Xavier Sáez

Researcher

BSC will host a new high-performance computing hub to speed up the development of fusion electricity

The BSC Advancing Computing Hub will be located in the new BSC building at Barcelona.

The EUROfusion consortium will invest a total of € 59.8 million in nineteen research projects in their Work Plan 2021-2025 to strengthen understanding and predicting of fusion processes in the European fusion programme. One of these projects will benefit from the expertise at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) to improve the computational conditions for fusion energy.

Prior to this EUROfusion investment, BSC already holds two reference HPC performance groups in Europe, i.e. the PRACE High-Level Support Team (HLST) and the Performance Optimisation and Productivity Centre of Excellence (POP CoE). The new EUROfusion Advanced Computing Hub (ACH) will become the third one. The PRACE HLST, POP CoE and BSC Fusion group members played a key role in building the winning proposal, thus making BSC one of the three reference European teams in HPC performance for fusion. The BSC ACH will include 8 full-time team members with secured funds until 2025.

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Our group manager selected for the EPS Plasma Physics Division Board

Mervi Mantsinen, ICREA Research professor and our Fusion group manager at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), has been selected for the European Physical Society Plasma Physics Division Board.

Mervi will start her tasks in the board in June 2021, together with five other newly selected members. The term will be four years from summer 2021 to summer 2025, renewable by mutual agreement for a second four-year term.

“It is a honour and a recognition by many people to be selected for this position of trust, which involves taking part with an active and visible role in many top-level decisions in the field”, Mervi states.

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EUROfusion webinar series on GPU topics

EUROfusion has organized a series of monthly webinars to address several GPU topics to help the fusion community to use this architecture on new supercomputers. The webinars consist of talks from programing paradigms to the developers’ experience, vendors’ technical talks, etc.

All the talks are recorded and there are publicly available on YouTube EUROfusion channel. Presentation and questions slides can be found on EUROfusion website.

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New agreement to finance BSC for the coming nine years

On 16 July, the Catalan Minister Àngels Chacon visited the MareNostrum supercomputer to present the guidelines for the new 2020-2029 agreement that guarantees the financing of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). The event was attended by the Secretary of Universities and Research of the Generalitat, Mr Francesc Xavier Grau, and the Rector of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Mr Francesc Torres.

The Minister of Business and Knowledge of the Generalitat de Catalunya, Ms Àngels Chacón, explained to the centre’s directors that the Catalan government will contribute 59 million euros to BSC under the agreement with the Spanish Government and the UPC for the period 2020-2029. This agreement has yet to be ratified.

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Welcome to MARCONI100, a new tool for fusion research

MARCONI 100 (Photo: CINECA)

MARCONI 100 (M100) is the new accelerated cluster acquired by CINECA, Italy, within PPI4HPC European initiative. MI100 is based on the IBM Power9 architecture with NVIDIA Volta GPUs and has a peak performance of 32 Pflops.

M100 became available in May 2020 to the European public and industrial researchers. In particular, the access to M100 is granted to users with approved projects for this platform (EUROfusion, PRACE, European HPC programs,…). EUROfusion community has 80 dedicated nodes of M100, which means a peak performance of 2.5 Pflops, to run fusion codes and boost the research in this field.

M100 opens the way to the pre-exascale Leonardo Supercomputer expected to be installed in 2021.

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