As customary in previous years, last week the 10th Edition of the PUMPS Summer School (Programming and Tuning Massively Parallel Systems) was held at Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC). The course is organized by Barcelona Supercomputing Center, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, UPC, and HiPEAC Network of Excellence. Our team member José Lorenzo had the opportunity to attend the course.
Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) has launched today the 2nd call for applications to the BSC STARS programme. BSC will incorporate 12 outstanding post-doctorate researchers in all fields of High Performance Computing and related applications. The initiative is part of COFUND call of the Marie Sklodowska Curie Actions within the Horizon 2020 Programme.
The new EUROfusion experimental campaign at the Joint European Torus (JET) located at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE), UK started earlier this week.
Our group leader Mervi Mantsinen participates in this new experimental campaign as one of the two scientific coordinators of experiment M18-05 “ICRH scenario support in D and T plasmas” at JET. This means that she is in charge of the scientific planning of this experiment and the coordination of its international team of approximately 45 scientists from various institutions all over Europe.
Last week, 3-7 June 2019, our group leader Mervi Mantsinen worked at the Max-Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) at Garching, Germany where she participated in the experimental campaign on the ASDEX Upgrade tokamak as part of the 2019 EUROfusion Medium Size Tokamak (MST1) campaigns.
The MST1 Task Force coordinates European joint experiments of the medium sized tokamaks, i.e. ASDEX Upgrade at IPP, Garching, Germany; MAST Upgrade at CCFE, Culham Science Centre, Abingdon, United Kingdom; and TCV at CRPP, Lausanne, Switzerland.
On 7 June, the European Commission (EC) has officially announced that EuroHPC has selected Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) as one of the institutions that will host a pre-exascale supercomputer in the high-capacity supercomputer network that will operate in the EU in 2021. The EC announcement describes the plan to acquire 3 pre-exascale machines with a peak performance of at least 150 Petaflops: Barcelona (Spain), Bolonia (Italy) and Kajaani (Finland).
The future MareNostrum 5 will be a heterogenous supercomputer that will achieve a peak performance of 200 Petaflops (200 · 1015 of operations per second), which is 18 times more than current MareNostrum 4.
Last week the Annual Retreat of the CASE department of BSC, to which the Fusion group belongs, was held in Altafulla, Tarragona, Spain. The event lasted two days and gathered the group members in a relaxing environment at the Mediterranean seaside. Prof. José María Cela, head of the Department, presented an overview of the current situation of CASE and the future research paths to be developed within the team. Later, the two spin-offs stemming from CASE, MITIGA and Elem Biotech, were introduced showing how our research can reach the market.