BSC to receive € 50M to develop the Spanish Government's AI training programme

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) will receive 50 million euros to develop the programmes to attract and retain talent that are part of the Artificial Intelligence Strategy, approved by the Spanish government last May, in which one of the fundamental axes is to promote training in AI. The resolution includes the training in the BSC of 158 professionals in the field of AI until 2028.

Thanks to this programme, BSC will have new experts in artificial intelligence, who will have access to the MareNostrum 5 supercomputer, one of the most powerful in Europe for the advancement of these new technologies. In this way, BSC positions itself as one of the main institutions for the promotion of Artificial Intelligence in Europe, following the criteria of transparency, ethics and responsibility as the main standard according to the regulation recently established by the European Union.

Representatives of the BSC participated last Monday in Madrid in the first working meeting organised by the Ministry for Digital Transformation and the Civil Service and the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, through the Secretary of State for Digitalisation and the Civil Service and the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Universities, respectively.

The meeting, held at the headquarters of Red.es, which is responsible for the investment and monitoring of the project, was also attended by representatives of the other three beneficiary organisations: Agencia Estatal del Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Cardiovasculares Carlos III (CNIC), and Fundación Sector Público Estatal Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Oncológicas Carlos III (CNIO).

The programme has awarded a total of 374 four-year training fellowships in the field of AI, with a total budget of €120 million, for the recruitment of technical research staff. This is one of the investments included in the National Digital Capabilities Plan as part of the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan.

158 grants awarded to the BSC

The aim of the talent attraction and retention programme proposed by the BSC for the period 2024-28 is to train professionals with the aim of taking a step forward with new lines of research in the convergence of supercomputing and artificial intelligence, taking advantage of the computational capabilities of MareNostrum 5, one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world.

The BSC will offer the 158 grantees a wide range of courses, in collaboration with various units of the centre, to facilitate both high quality research and the acquisition of technical, personal, leadership, communication and team management skills. These courses will be complemented by specific courses in supercomputing and its applications, aimed at both research communities and industry.

Currently, more than 250 researchers from the four scientific departments of the BSC (Computer Science, Life Sciences, Earth Sciences and Computational Applications for Science and Engineering) are working on projects where AI and supercomputing converge to advance science in diverse areas. This research focuses on four blocks: AI surrogates and simulation; digital twins; foundational models and Large Language Models (LLM); and the use of AI in tasks related to image processing from different application fields.

Expansion and reinforcement of MareNostrum 5

The Artificial Intelligence Strategy presented in May by the Government is based on the reality that supercomputing is a fundamental pillar for the advancement of AI. It therefore plans to invest up to 90 million euros to improve the performance of the MareNostrum 5 and reinforce the Red Española de Supercomputación (RES), which will contribute to placing Spain at the forefront of AI technology at a global level.

This upgrade involves the implementation of new highly specialised clusters to advance AI research, which will increase the processing capacity of MareNostrum 5 by almost 50%, i.e. over 450 petaflops, equivalent to the capacity to perform up to 450,000 trillion operations per second.

Another key objective of the strategy is, under the coordination of the BSC, the creation and expansion of a family of language models in Spanish and co-official languages, to be called ALIA, the first results of which will be available after the summer. These models will make it possible to reduce biases and improve the practical applications that companies and administrations can develop.

This article was first published on 11 July by Barcelona Supercomputing Center.