The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) is at the service of the international scientific community and of industry that requires HPC resources. Our multidisciplinary research team and our computational facilities –including MareNostrum– make BSC an international centre of excellence in e-Science. Since its establishment in 2005, BSC has developed an active role in fostering HPC in Spain and Europe as an essential tool for international competitiveness in science and engineering. The centre manages the Red Española de Supercomputación (RES), and is a hosting member of the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) initiative. We actively participate in the main European HPC initiatives, in close cooperation with other European supercomputing centres. With a total staff of more than 650 R&D experts and professionals, BSC has been successful in attracting talent, and our research focuses on four fields: Computer Sciences, Life Sciences, Earth Sciences and Computer Applications in Science and Engineering.
Most of BSC's research lines are developed within the framework of European Union research funding programmes, and the centre also does basic and applied research in collaboration with leading companies such as IBM, Microsoft, Intel, Nvidia, Lenovo, Fujitsu, Repsol and Iberdrola. The centre has been extremely active in the EC Framework Programmes and has participated in seventy-nine projects funded by it. BSC is a founding member of HiPEAC, the ETP4HPC and participates in the most relevant international roadmapping and discussion forums and has strong links to Latin America. Education and Training is a priority for the centre and many of BSCs researchers are also university lecturers. BSC offers courses as a PRACE Advanced Training Centre, and through the Spanish national supercomputing network among others. The quality of our investigation has been recognized by the Spanish government with the Severo Ochoa Excellence Centre grant for cutting edge Spanish science.
The BSC-CNS Computer Sciences Department focuses on building upon currently available hardware and software technologies and adapting these technologies to make efficient use of supercomputing infrastructures. The department proposes novel architectures for processors and memory hierarchy and develops programming models and innovative implementation approaches for these models as well as tools for performance analysis and prediction. BSC has been a pioneer in research relating to RISC-V in Spain, organizing the RISC-V Workshop in May 2018 and pushing multiple initiatives around RISC-V technologies such as EPI, Red RISC-V, DeRISC, Selene and DRAC.