The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and Lenovo have signed an agreement this afternoon for the investment of 7 million over three years. This is the largest investment made by the technology multinational in Spain and will be aimed at advancing precision medicine through the use of supercomputing and the development of open source European chips. In addition, it will enable the creation of the next generation of energy-sustainable supercomputers and data centers.
Kirk Skaugen, Executive Vice President of Lenovo, assures that both companies "share the same vision of computing architecture", for which he is committed to working together to build more efficient, sustainable and powerful supercomputers. For his part, the director of the BSC has highlighted that the contribution arises after six years of collaboration and that it will allow meeting the technological objectives of both Spain and the European Commission.
The use of supercomputing for precision medicine facilitates the storage of DNA-related data, which can occupy millions of gigabytes of information in databases. As part of the investment, the researcher Miquel Moretó, who leads the BSC team, will study the design of new accelerators to improve the analysis of genomic data in order to facilitate, for example, the generation of new treatments against diseases such as cancer.
The alliance between Lenovo and BSC aims to achieve this efficiency using the minimum of energy. The estimated consumption of the most powerful supercomputers can be equivalent to the cost of a medium-sized city. Julita Corbalán will lead the team in charge of developing software for optimization and energy management to promote savings in consumption.
The agreement also seeks to boost Europe's competitiveness in technologies and achieve a digital transformation. In that context, the EU aims to double its current global market share to 20% by 2030. The BSC's mission is to design and develop chip technology based on open instruction set architecture. That is, simple instructions with an open source license.
