BSC celebrated its Annual Meeting 2021 on Friday the 17th of December. The meeting has now become a tradition at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), providing a stage for all BSC researchers to share their wonderful work with their co-workers. For second year in a row, and due to the global pandemic, the event was hosted online with on-site talks.
After a short comical sketch centered around the newly-inaugurated BSC building, BSC’s Director Prof. Mateo Valero and Associate Director Pep Martorell started the event by giving an overview on the evolution and work done by BSC in 2021.
Despite a tough year due to the pandemic, 2021 has been a year of growth for BSC, both in number of people and in scientific impact. New Spanish and European projects being started, like the European digit-twin project Destination Earth, the Spanish quantum-computing ecosystem Quantum Spain, EUROfusion’s Advanced Computing Hub and FusionCAT, with the latter two lead by our Fusion group.
The event continued with the traditional BSC Talks, where some of our researchers give an overview of the fantastic work they do at the center. Gender equality at BSC, quantum computing, sex and gender bias in artificial intelligence and providing a better user experience in data visualization were some of the topics addressed by the different speakers. The Best BSC Talk was awarded to Daniel Rodrígez for his talk on enhancing the air quality in the Barcelona metropolitan area.
One of the highlights of the event was the talk given by BSC’s Operations Director Sergi Girona on the upcoming Marenostrum 5 supercomputer. The new machine will be one of the five pre-hexascale supercomputers in Europe, ans is scheduled to start construction at the end of next year after a public tender at the beginning of 2022.
Finally, some selected researchers received the BSC distinctions 2021 for their special merits and achievements this past year.