SupercompuTing And Related applicationS Fellows Program

Informations projet

STARS

N° de convention de subvention: 754433

DOI

10.3030/754433

Projet clôturé

Date de signature de la CE 11 Avril 2017

Date de début 1 Janvier 2018

Date de fin 31 Decembre 2023

Financé au titre de

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Coût total

€ 2 832 000,00

Contribution de l’UE

€ 1 416 000,00

Coordonné par

BARCELONA SUPERCOMPUTING CENTER CENTRO NACIONAL DE SUPERCOMPUTACION
Spain

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - STARS (SupercompuTing And Related applicationS Fellows Program)

Période du rapport: 2023-01-01 au 2023-12-31

Résumé du contexte et des objectifs généraux du projet

The development of European HPC is recognised as a key element of European economic competitiveness, as recently described in several Recommendations of the European Commission to the European Parliament and Council.
The BSC STARS (SupercompuTing And Related applicationS) International Research Fellows program aims at fostering the training of highly skilled post-doc in all fields of High Performance Computing and related applications, specifically in Earth Science and Meteorology, in Life Sciences, Genomics and Personalised Medicine and in Computational Engineering and Physics and Computational Societies, providing them with all the necessary tools for developing their potentials, deepening their skills and knowledge in a stimulating, international and interdisciplinary environment, offering them intersectorial secondments with private industry or non-academic Research centers, in order to boost their career perspectives as successful independent researchers.

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

During the six years of the programme, STARS will award 20 outstanding post-doctorate researchers of all nationalities with 24 month INCOMING fellowships.
The fellowships are granted through a transparent and rigorous selection procedure, starting with wide publication of two calls awarding a total of 20 fellowships, followed by the evaluation of the candidatures, the selection of the best fellows and their incorporation procedure. The recruited fellows spend most of their period at BSC carrying out interdisciplinary research project of their choice involving at least 2 different research BSC lines, being incorporated into the group of the main research area. They will also have the possibility to spend a period of 1-3 months of intersectorial secondment in one of the Research Partnering Organisations

Travail effectué depuis le début du projet jusqu’à la fin de la période considérée dans le rapport et principaux résultats atteints jusqu’à présent

The project started on 1 of jan 2018. According to the plan, the first call for candidates was launched in spring of that year and a first batch of 8 fellows were recruited between novermber 2018 and february 2019. A second call has been published in Summer 2019, and lead to the hiring on 7 additonal fellows.
In the first call, we had 20 applications from women and 50 from men, in the second 15 from women and 48 from men, with somethig like 50% of the canidates being from an European country, 31% from Asia and the rest almost in equal parts from North and South America and Africa. In the third call, seven were from women and 14 from men, with 22% and 48% of the candidates being from a European country in the 2nd and 3rd calls, respectively.

A dedicated web page has been created within the BSC webpage, to provide information for the applicants and to give visibility to the programme.
The Center organised a management structure in order to supervise and follow up the research training of the fellows as well as to manage the processes of evaluation and recruitment of each call, and the necessary financial co-funding.
Fellows are working on a variety of topics, from Natural Hazards simulations, to Clima Forecast , Measuring of the Air Quality, Genomic and bioinformatics as well as the use of medical data for social analysis, just to mention a few.

Progrès au-delà de l’état des connaissances et impact potentiel prévu (y compris l’impact socio-économique et les conséquences sociétales plus larges du projet jusqu’à présent)

According to theD igital Single Market Strategic Group in “A common European response to shared goals, A concept for tackling the digital skills challenges in Europe” -2017
"Digitisation is leading to increasing demand for ICT professionals in all sectors of the economy. Indeed already more than half of all ICT professionals work outside the ICT sectors in ICT-using industries such as automotive, pharmaceuticals and the like. Employment of ICT professionals has increased by around 1.5 million over the last five years alone. However, supply is not keeping pace with demand and it is expected that by 2020 Europe could have around 756 000 unfilled vacancies for ICT professionals. At the same time, we have almost 20% youth unemployment in the EU. We need to train more young people for these new digital jobs.”
STARS is training outstanding postdoctoral researchers in different scientific disciplines, who all have in common the use of High Perfomance Computing for carrying out their scientific investigations. This will contribute to streghten their skills as ICT experts, and moreover to reinforce the role of the European Union as current leader in the HPC field, so to help to implement the objectives defined by the EC in April 2016( EC Communication "European Cloud initiative - Building a competitive data and knowledge economy for Europe”). This communication also led to the creation of the JU Euro-HPC, which has the main goal  to ensure the development in Europe of a whole exascale supercomputing capability, and to cover the whole value chain (from technology components to systems and machines, and to applications and skills).
BSC is actively partecipating in this Joint Undertaking, and is active in a very large number of research projects in this field. The STARS fellows are therefore exposed to a very wide number of important research initiatives at international level, both in collaboration with academic partners as well as with industrial organizations. At the time of this report, two of them are engaging in short terms secondments in spin-offs , which will open them new career perspectives and opportunities at the end of their fellowship.

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