Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación  (BSC-CNS)

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación  (BSC-CNS) was established in 2005 as the Spanish national supercomputing facility and a hosting member of the PRACE distributed supercomputing infrastructure. The Center houses MareNostrum-IV, one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe. The mission of BSC is to research, develop, and manage information technologies in order to facilitate scientific progress. BSC combines HPC service provision and R&D into both computer and computational science (Life, Earth, and Engineering Sciences) under one roof and currently has over 725 staff from 51 countries. BSC has collaborated with industry since its creation and participates in various bilateral joint research centers with companies such as IBM, Microsoft, Intel, NVIDIA, and the Spanish oil company Repsol. The center has been extremely active in the EC Framework Programme and has participated in over 100 projects funded by it. BSC is a founding member of HiPEAC, the ETP4HPC, and other international forums.

The Computer Applications in Science and Engineering (CASE) department involved in the CoE RAISE is a multidisciplinary research unit, which serves as a bridge between e-Science and advanced Computer Science technologies, developing new computational strategies to simulate complex problems specifically adapted to run efficiently on modern supercomputers. Among the simulation codes developed by the department, the Alya code has been developed since 2005 to exploit massively parallel resources. Alya has been applied to solve a great variety of engineering challenges in different fields such as Bio-Mechanics, Combustion, Aeronautics, Smart Cites, and Wind Energy.

The scientific activities of BSC's team in RAISE will center on Wind Energy problems. The simulation of wind farms involves two main components. On the one hand, at large scale, the topography includes complex terrain and many possible climate conditions. On the other hand, at local scale, the wind turbines, which number can go from tens to hundreds, locally perturbate the airflow. The integration of both scales into a single simulation is currently not feasible for time and cost reasons.

To remedy account for this, WP3 - Compute-Driven Use-Cases towards Exascale seeks for novel solutions to take into consideration these local effects. BSC, together with its scientific partner RTU, investigates solutions to build and include accurate surrogates for wind turbines, specifically trained with high fidelity simulations, and enabling to accurately predict the short and mid-term power generation of wind farms. BSC is involved as well in WP6 - Outreach and Services, aiming at creating a European network of contact points, to provide infrastructural and knowledge access, consulting, and further services to user communities from industry, SMEs, and academia with less developed expertise in AI and HPC. Finally, BSC also provides HPC hardware support in WP2 - AI- and HPC-Cross Methods at Exascale, transferring its know-how to the partners for an efficient usage of the supercomputers and facilitating their access.