STARS - About BSC

Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) is the Spanish national supercomputing facility. Created in 2005, it quickly established itself as one of the main research centres in High Performance Computing in Europe.

BSC houses MareNostrum, one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe, and is a Tier-0 hosting member of the PRACE distributed supercomputing infrastructure. The mission of BSC is to research, develop and manage information technologies in order to facilitate scientific progress. BSC was a pioneer in combining HPC service provision and R&D into both computer and computational science (life, earth and engineering sciences) under one roof. The Centre fosters interdisciplinary scientific collaboration and innovation and currently has over 500 staff from 44 countries, working in 30 different groups, divided into 4 main research departments. In 2011 and 2015 BSC was awarded by the Spanish government as “Severo Ochoa Centre of Excellence” together with only 7 other Spanish research centres.

Career Development, Education and Training is a priority for the Centre, which has been recently awarded with the badge of ‘HR Excellence in research by the EC. Therefore, at BSC, fellows will benefit from access to all the research facilities provided by BSC, and they will receive special thematic training sessions in complementary skills within the frame of the Excellence Supplementary Diploma developed around the principles of the Charter and Code for Researchers. During their stay at BSC, fellows will participate in challenging research projects of outstanding quality, highly competitive at the international level, in an international environment (more than 30% of BSC personnel is not Spanish). BSC participates in 178 projects out of which 48 were funded by FP7 and H2020. It is engaged in national and international collaborations with world-leading HPC technology providers (such as IBM, Intel, Nvidia, Microsoft, CISCO) and consumers (such as Repsol, Iberdrola, AEMET; AstraZeneca, MeteoFrance). These quality indicators demonstrate the unique international and inter-sectorial (academy, research organizations and industry) research, training and collaboration opportunities to which postdoctoral fellows of the STARS Fellowship Programme will be exposed, significantly boosting their career development perspectives.

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