The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), home of the MareNostrum supercomputer, and IBM have announced an initiative called “Future of Computing” to develop high-performance chips with European technology. The objective is to achieve new processors that are more efficient with lower energy consumption, which will contribute to reducing the European Union’s technological dependence on North American and Asian companies, which dominate this market.
One of the parts of the agreement includes an investment by IBM of 3 million euros in scholarships for education and research. The new processors will be designed using the open source RISC-V standard and would be primarily intended for what is called High Performance Computing (HPC). The agreement was signed by the director of the BSC, Mateo Valero, and by the president of IBM Spain, Portugal, Greece and Israel, Horacio Morell, at the RISC-V summit that brings together Spanish universities in Barcelona.
La Vanguardia has been able to speak in detail about this agreement with Mateo Valero and with Alberto GarcÃa, chief engineer of IBM’s Quantum community. The director of the BSC explains that, in the chip industry, “what exists now are distribution game owners, such as Intel, AMD and Nvidia. The competition is between these few, so there is little chance to compete. Now Curiously, some rules are established that things are going to be open – the RISC-V open standard -, with which there is going to be much more competition that is going to improve everything”.
Alberto GarcÃa supports this assessment and points out that “IBM is very willing to support European technologies that are generated here”. “RISC-V -he observes- is an open standard that will allow not only proprietary companies to make chips, but also for anyone to access it. Opening the chip market will allow more competitiveness, it will allow chip prices to be reduced, that there is a lot of availability, and it will allow the technological sovereignty of Europe”.
Mateo Valero assures that IBM “has always tried to create wealth here. In this specific case, they are helping Barcelona, ​​Catalonia and Spain to really create high-quality jobs.” In parallel, the BSC is coordinating all Spanish universities to teach RISC-V. “This has never happened in the Spanish university: prepare girls and boys who really change the world -says the director of the BSC-“. “The chips are the ones that dominate the world and now there will be the possibility of making many chips, optimized for certain things, and that Spanish engineers have as good jobs here as abroad. It is another part of the agreement, that they will help to all this and I’m very happy,” he says.
What are these new chips going to be used for? Valero clarifies that “the chips that supercomputers have are the fastest in the world, but at the same time they are used for other things.” Among them, artificial intelligence, which has exploded by introducing it into supercomputers, but also in uses such as autonomous cars. The director of the BSC warns that the work is not limited to the processors themselves, because one of the objectives is that they have “associated software” to achieve the minimum possible consumption. “It’s useless to build a 300-story skyscraper if people don’t come in later. It has to be a co-design. We learned that from IBM,” he says.
The result of the investigation will have a transfer to the industry. Alberto GarcÃa points out that the goal of this research “is not only the development of local talent, but also to transfer everything that we can investigate to the industry, because that link between research entities and the industry is sometimes a bit lost” . Mateo Valero agrees: “we believe that the ones that produce wealth in a country are the companies and everything that the research centers can do for them is our obligation as researchers. Investigating consists of helping to create jobs in Spain, or Barcelona”.
IBM and the BSC have collaborated from the beginning. In fact, the technology company was at the origin of this entity. “Without many things coming together, but without IBM, which was important, the BSC would not exist,” says Mateo Valero. “The BSC was the continuation of an idea we had in 1985 with Joan Majó as minister, to create a parallel computer center at the Polytechnic called the Barcelona European Center for Parallelism (CEPBA)”, he recounts.
Ten years later, with the sponsorship of IBM and the governments of Spain, Catalonia and the UPC, a joint center called CIRI (CEPBA-IBM Research Institute) was created “That CIRI was what motivated the employers to create a Spanish center. What helped is that IBM put a priced machine at that time, which was 12 million,” says Mateo. With it “new technologies were tested. It was the first commodity supercomputer in the sense that the hardware was that of PowerPC and the software was Linux.” “That combination -he points out- had never occurred and it turns out that we suddenly set up the fourth supercomputer in the world. That is the origin of the BSC and how we contacted IBM as we did from 2000 to 2004 this center, which without them would not have existed”.
