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The Computational Earth Sciences (CES) group is a multidisciplinary team with different IT profiles that interacts closely with all the other groups of the Earth Sciences Department. The group provides help and guidance to the scientists with the technical issues relating to their work and develops a framework for the most efficient use of HPC resources. In order to improve the use of the variety of computing resources available at the BSC and in other HPC institutions, a solid software development, profiling and optimisation area has been created for Earth system model codes towards exascale computing, and to provide feedback on this to modellers around Europe. Last but not least, the development of a framework to disseminate the outputs generated by the BSC-ES among the research and service community has been established. This area takes advantage of the unique environment of the BSC where research in Big Data and Artificial Intelligence is already a priority that will be extended in the next few years.
One of the common scopes of the group is the guidance on the use of IT resources, with the aim of Designing and maintaining an IT infrastructure allowing the research teams the accomplishment of their objectives. This involves:
The group is led by Kim Serradell and is organised in 3 teams (“Models and Workflows”, “Performance” and “Data and Diagnostics”) as shown below.
In this section, one can find, similarly to the “Starting at ES” page some guidelines when starting working in CES
Current members: Miguel Castrillo (team leader), Mario Acosta, Francesca Macchia, Miriam Olid, Carles Tena, Julian Rodrigo Berlín, Marcus Falls, Gilbert Montané, Daniel Beltrán, Wilmer Uruchi, Eric Ferrer.
Purpose: Development of HPC user-friendly software framework for Earth system modelling and the management of operational systems
Tasks:
Projects and softwares developed:
Current members: Mario Acosta (team leader), Miguel Castrillo, Oriol Tinto, Sergi Palomas, Stella Paronuzzi, Xavier Yepes, Christian Guzman, Iria Ayan
Purpose: Efficient use of the computational resources by the research groups
Tasks:
Projects and softwares developed:
Current members: Francesco Benincasa, Pierre-Antoine Bretonnière (team leaders), An-Chi Ho, Saskia Loosveldt Tomas, Lluís Palma García, Núria Pérez-Zanón, Margarida Samsó, Javier Vegas, Amalia Vradi, Daniel Trujillo, Carlos Gomez, Giulia Carella
Purpose: Provision of data services
Tasks:
Projects and softwares developed:
Every month the CES group meets and each group presents the activities carried on (updated in the Trello of the group), the issues encountered and progresses made. The following document contains the presentations of CES team meetings. In the CES group, we are not only computer guys and girls, we are also cooks! Take a look!
Useful CES references to add in ES publications.
Postdoctoral Researcher
Interests: HPC performance, Computer Architecture, Scientific Models, Computational Dynamic Fluids, Mathematical algorithms
Contact: mario.acosta@bsc.es
Mario Acosta is a postdoctoral researcher and the leader of the Performance Team in the Computational group at the BSC (Barcelona Supercomputing Center) Earth Science Department. He obtained his PhD from University of Granada (Spain) in 2015, on High Performance Computing applied to Earth System Modeling. This expertise includes wide knowledge in numerical models (governing equations, numerical algorithms and computational implementation) and how to adapt them efficiently to actual and new High Performance Computing (HPC) resources. He is working in the HPC WP of ESiWACE2, ESCAPE2 and INMERSE and the leader of the HPC WP of IS-ENES3 as BSC PI. Moreover, he is also the PI of a research project with KNMI related to HPC of the model Harmonie-Arome. He is author of 8 peer-reviewed articles in international journals. He presented his work at 14 congresses and workshops, and reviewed some manuscripts for peer-review journals. He is or has been the supervisor of two PhD students and three master students and several degree students, who are developing theses in the HPC topic. Additionally, he is associate professor at Universitat Politecnic of Catalunya (UPC).
Software Engineer
Interests: Software development, Data management, Big Data
Francesco Benincasa holds a Master Degree in “Software Engineering” from the “Alma Mater Studiorum - Bologna University” (Italy) in 2004. After working in the private sector on web and databases development and automatic shop applications, he started his experience in supercomputing and data manipulation (SCS, CINECA spin-off - Bologna - Italy) oriented to biomedical simulations, participating to several FP6 and FP7 European projects. Since 2010 he is at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) working on air quality data management, processing and visualization. He is in charge of data processing and management and web development and maintenance of the WMO SDS-WAS NA-ME-E Regional Center (SDS) and the Barcelona Dust Forecast Center (BDFC), both projects operated by a consortium of BSC and AEMET (Spanish Meteorological Agency) under the umbrella of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) with the goals to improve the understanding of sand and dust storms phenomena through air quality models comparison and evaluation (SDS) and to provide an operational daily dust forecast over the mediterranean area (BDFC). He also co-coordinates the Data and Diagnostics Team inside CES group.
Postdoctoral Researcher, STARS/MSCA-COFUND fellow
Interests: Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Computer vision and image processing, Data Science, Statistics, Open Science, Python scientific development
Contact: carlos.gomez@bsc.es Linkedin GitHub
Postdoctoral Researcher
Interests: Statistics, Spatio-temporal statistics, Bayesian methods, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Open Science, Climatology, R and Python scientific development
Contact: giulia.carella@bsc.es Linkedin GitHub
Computational Engineer, Software Analyst
Interests: HPC performance, Scientific Models, Data management and visualization
Contact: miguel.castrillo@bsc.es, Twitter, Linkedin
Short Bio: Miguel Castrillo (Male), Computer Scientist in the Computational Earth Sciences group: Miguel has an MSc in Computer Science from the University of León and a BA in Geography and History from the National Distance Education University of Spain (UNED). Having experience as an analyst and software developer for different private sector companies, he joined the Computational Earth Sciences group in the Earth Sciences department of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) in 2012. Since then, he has been participating in different projects, due to his experience in various technical fields. Nevertheless, he specialized in HPC performance and workflows for Earth Science models, being involved in the IS-ENES2, IS-ENES3, ESiWACE and ESiWACE2 H2020 projects, as well as the IMMERSE H2020 project and Copernicus CMEMS 87 HPC ORCA36 as PI. Miguel has also contributed to the preparation and research support of several PRACE projects (HiResNTCP, Glob15km, LSIHP, HiResSIR, etc). During this time, he has been a member of the NEMO System Team, the NEMO HPC working group, the EC-Earth technical working group, and the recently created EC-Earth4 working group. He is currently head of the Models and Workflows Team in the Earth Sciences department at the same time as he is doing a Masters degree in Artificial Intelligence in the Polytechnic University of Catalonia.
Position: Research engineer
Interests: Python, data analysis, climate modelling.
Contact: marcus.falls@bsc.es Linkedin
Marcus is a Research Engineer in the Computational Earth Sciences Group. He has a BSc (with Honours) in Mathematics from the University of St Andrews, Scotland and a Master’s in Modelling for Science and Engineering from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). Having focused on applied mathematics during his Bachelor’s (including dynamical systems, fluid mechanics, differential equations and symbolic computation) he completed his final year dissertation on numerical weather modelling. During his time in the Master’s, he took an internship at Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB) where he worked on the assessment of model performance of meteorological and air quality models over Barcelona using Python. He has worked in the Earth Science department since September 2018, working very closely with the biogeochemists in the Climate Prediction Group as part of the ORCAS project. This work has involved implementing the Transport Matrix Method (TMM) to the ocean model, processing and reformatting raw data from autonomous sensors from the ocean to be used by departmental tools, and analysing different methods to perform sensitivity analysis, including the use of a genetic algorithm and Uranie for the ESCAPE2 project.
Research Engineer - Linkedin
Interests: Computer Science, Software Engineering ,High Performance Computing , Geosciences
Contact: julian.berlin@bsc.es
Short bio: Julian is a Research software engineer in the Computational Earth Sciences group: He holds a MSc in Computer Sciences from the University of Buenos Aires. Julian has 17 years of working experience as a software engineer and related disciplines, his expertise varies from Software architecture and design to OOP development and programming under several technologies and development environments, he has worked for companies and international organizations in Argentina, United States and the Netherlands before joining BSC in Barcelona, such as the Inter-American development bank (IADB) and the Technical university of Delft (TU-Delft) where he participated in research projects funded by the European commission through Marie Curie and Copernicus initiatives (CHANGES project). his interests vary from Software engineering topics such as Software Architecture and UI/UX to HPC platforms and Earth Sciences. He is currently assigned to the Models and Workflows team, involved in the maintenance and development of Auto-EC-Earth workflow manager and other internal tools of the department apart of providing support and help on related topics.
Research Engineer
Interests: Meteorology, Numerical Weather Prediction, Earth system models, Software development
Contact: gilbert.montane@bsc.es Linkedin
Gilbert holds a BSc in Computer Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC), a MSc in Project Management from the Ramón Llull University (La Salle, URL) and a Master's degree in Meteorology from the University of Barcelona (UB). After working some years as a Software Engineer in a multinational company, in 2018 he joined the Models & Workflows team (Computational Earth Sciences group, Earth Sciences department) as a Research Engineer, working on the development of the workflow to run the NMMB-MONARCH model using the Autosubmit workflow manager (Auto-MONARCH) and giving support to the Atmospheric Composition group.
Research Support Engineer
Interests: Atmospheric Pollution, Photochemical models, Emissions modelling
Computational Earth Sciences group leader - Linkedin
Interests: Earth system models, performance analysis and team management.
Short bio: Msc. Kim Serradell Maronda is currently managing the Computational Earth Sciences group in the Earth Sciences department at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS). In the last years, he has been in charge for the system administration of all the computational resources of the department and he was also responsible for supervising the operational runs of the NMMB/BSC-CTM model and CALIOPE Air Quality System at BSC. In that sense, he was also involved in the analysis of the models to improve their performance and developed strong skills of compilation and scripting. Furthermore, he's focused in deploying different earth system models (dust transport, climate or weather forecast) required by the department in a wide range of HPC architectures. Work Package leader within ESiWACE and ESiWACE2 (H2020 Weather and Climate Center of Excellence), IS-ENES3 (H2020) and ESCAPE-2 (FET H2020) and he is also involved in EC-FP7 and H2020 projects: IS-ENES2, Montblanc, IMMERSE and QA4Seas.
Computer Engineer specialized in Computer Architecture and HPC - LinkedIn - ORCID
Position: Developer
Interests: CALIOPE, WRF, HERMESv2, HERMESv3_GR, HERMESv3_BU, CMAQ, Computer Architecture and High Performance Computing
Contact: carles.tena@bsc.es
Short bio: Bachelor on computer science by the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) and finalizing the master on computational mathematics by Rovira i Virgili University (URV). His main experience is in the development of models and workflows for the daily (emissions, meteorological and air quality) forecast mainly developed in the objected oriented programming language Python. He coordinates the technical development of the emission model HERMESv3. He has technically coordinated the air quality forecast for the Mexico City, he has maintained the CALIOPE system and supervised the daily forecast related with air quality for the Spanish ministry. He is part of the Computational Earth Science group of the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC) that has into him tasks to provide help and orientation to the scientists with technical problems related with their job and to develop an optimized framework to use more efficiently the high performance computation resources. His work has produced tree papers on scientist’s publications and the supervision of one master student final thesis.
PhD Student in High Performance Computing for Ocean Modeling
Interests: Earth Sciences, Computer Sciences, Modeling and Technology
Software engineer
Interests: Climate diagnostics, data standards
Short bio: Javier Vegas-Regidor is a Physics and Computer Sciences graduated from the University of Salamanca. He joined BSC Earth Sciences Department in 2015 and he is currently the person in charge of the climate diagnostics for the Earth Sciences Department. He is also part of the core development team of ESMValTool in behalf of BSC-ES and the PRIMAVERA H2020 project. His main responsibilities include the enhancement and maintenance of the current tools but also exploring new tools and technologies that can be applied to diagnostics.
Computer engineer specialized in computer architecture and HPC - LinkedIn
Position: Research engineer
Interests: Earth Sciences Modelling, computer architecture and High Performance Computing
Short bio: Xavier Yepes-Arbós is a research engineer from the Computational Earth Sciences Group of the Earth Sciences Department at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). He joined BSC in 2015 to work on applying High Performance Computing (HPC) to Earth system models (ESMs). His main research lines include topics on scalability and performance analysis of ESMs, characterization of ESM workflows to improve their throughput, and optimization of the I/O process of ESMs by adopting scalable parallel I/O solutions. He holds a bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering with specialization in computer architecture and a master’s degree in Innovation and Research in Informatics (MIRI) with specialization in HPC from the Facultat d’Informàtica de Barcelona (FIB) at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC). He was awarded the BSC Severo Ochoa Scholarship for his master’s degree.
Position: Junior Research Engineer
Contact: iria.ayan@bsc.es
Short bio: Iria Ayan is a physicist from University of Barcelona (UB) with a Master in Astrophysics, Particle Physics and Cosmology from the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB). Her main experience has been related to high energy astrophysics and, in particular, she has focused on the study of gamma-ray binary systems. She has published in Proceeding of Science her research on searching for new gamma-ray binaries in order to be detected by new future telescopes such as the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA). Since 2019, she works at BSC in the Computation Earth Sciences group developing new features in the land-use model (H-TESSEL) embedded in the IFS weather model.
Position: Postdoctoral researcher
Interests: Climatology, Meteorology, Statistical Programming, Extreme Events, Data Sciences
Contact: nuria.perez@bsc.es - LinkedIn
Short bio: Núria Pérez-Zanón is a postdoctoral researcher and member of the Data and Diagnostic teams in the Computational Earth Sciences group at BSC. With a background in Physics and Meteorology (degrees from the University of Barcelona; UB), she obtained her PhD from Rovira i Virgili University (URV) in 2017 on Climate variability and Change detection in the central Pyrenees using instrumental and paleoclimate proxy data. This expertise includes quality control and homogenization methodologies for observed in-situ data, as well as, the methodologies to explore the relationship between natural proxies (tree-ring data and lake sediments) and observed climate, such as time series analysis and spectral analysis (e.g.: clustering, Principal Component Analysis and Wavelet analysis). During the thesis, one year and a half of research stay in LOCEAN (Laboratoire d’Océanographie et du Climat) allowed to work in the reconstruction of past modes of variability. She is the author of 8 peer-reviewed articles in international journals. She was recognized with the Eduard Fontserè 2015 international award for the study of mortality due to heatwaves in the Barcelona metropolitan area. After working in the H2020 Indecis project as a postdoctoral researcher in the URV, she is currently working in Earth Sciences department at BSC, mainly involved in several Copernicus Climate Change Contracts (C3S_512, MAGIC,…) and the MEDSCOPE ERA4CS project. She is also coordinating the development and maintenance of the R tools of the department which cover the scientific needs from loading big datasets until applied best state-of-the-art methodologies for correcting, assessing, calibrating and processing sub-seasonal to decadal forecast and climate projections by adapting them efficiently to High Performance Computing resources.
Position: IT Technician
Contact: albert.vilamiro@bsc.es
Short bio: Albert Vila Miró is the IT Technician of Earth Sciences Department at Barcelona Supercomputing Center. He study a formative cycle of Microcomputer Systems and Networks in La Salle Girona. He was in practice in La Salle Cassà de la Selva, making maintenance of laptops, PC’s, creation of working areas for users, creation and management users with Windows Server, clone and format disks, computer assembly, installation of operating systems, software and drivers… When finishes the practice, he works in “Consell Comarcal del Gironès” with creation of multimedia products. Assembly, installation, management and maintenance of equipment and peripherals of the Consell Comarcal del Gironès. Software installation and drivers. Help all users of Consell Comarcal del Gironès with any problem related with computer equipment, programs, services, printers… Now, he works in BSC to support all users in Earth Sciences Department with creation of manuals, clone and format disks, installation of operating systems, management and maintenance of equipment and peripherals, software installation and drivers, preparation of new equipment, help all users with any problem related with computer equipment, programs, peripherals…
Position: Research Student
Interests: HPC performance, Scientific Models, Computer Architecture
Contact:christian.guzman@bsc.es
Short bio: Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering plus a bachelor's degree in Telecommunication Electronic Engineering, and a Master in Modelling for Science and Engineering by the “Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona” (UAB). Main experience in techniques for High-Performance Computing (HPC) and actually working on Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) on the development of Chemistry Across Multiple Phases (CAMP) module alongside the Multiscale Online Nonhydrostatic Atmosphere Chemistry Model (MONARCH), contributing to the most-computational and logic part from a performance point of view and integrating multitudinal ways of GPU computation in search of speeding-up the system.
Position: Junior research engineer
Interests: Climate modelling and forecasting, Earth observation, Renewable energies and Computational sciences.
Contact: lluis.palma@bsc.es - LinkedIn
Position: Research Engineer
Interests: Workflows, Earth system models, High Performance Computing
Contact: francesca.macchia@bsc.es
Short Bio: MSc degree cum laude in Computer Engineering at the University of Salento (Italy), Francesca starts her research activity in the field of high-performance computing working in the Department of Engineering for Innovation of the same university. From 2013 to 2017 she worked at the Euro-Mediterranean Centre for Climate Changes (Italy), focusing on optimization and parallelization of hydrodynamic models and the design and development of a system to handle ensemble simulations and perform data assimilation in oceanic models. Since 2017, she is a Research Engineer in the Computational Earth Science (CES) group at the Earth Sciences department in the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), developing the workflow of the Multiscale Online Non-hydrostatic AtmospheRe CHemistry model (MONARCH) in collaboration with Atmospheric Composition group.
Position: Junior Data Manager
Interests: Data management, Big Data
Contact: margarida.samso_cabre@bsc.es - Linkedin
Short Bio: Margarida is a Research software engineer in the Data and Diagnostics team from the Computational Earth Sciences group. She has a Bachelor's degree in Telecomuncations Engineering (Universitat Ramon Llull), a Master in Project Management (Universitat Ramon Llull) and now is studying a Master in Bioinformatics and Bio-statistics (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya). She worked as a government consultant at La Generalitat and l'Ajuntament de Barcelona, as a project management assistant at Caixa Capital Risk and as an IT Technician at ESADE.
Position: Junior research engineer
Interests: High Performance Computing, computer architecture , Workflows
Contact: daniel.beltran@bsc.es
Position: Junior research engineer
Contact: saskia.loosveldt@bsc.es
Short Bio: Saskia has an undergraduate degree in Physics from the Universitat de Barcelona and a master degree in Numerical Methods for Engineering from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. During her undergrad, she got introduced to the field of High Performance Computing while being an intern at HPCNow!, a consultancy company for supercomputing services. After finishing her master degree, she started to work at the Data and Diagnostics team. Her work focuses on the post-process of climate model output variables.
Position: Research Engineer
Interests: Earth Sciences, Computer Sciences, HPC
Contact: stella.paronuzzi@bsc.es - Linkedin
Position: Research Engineer
Contact: an.ho@bsc.es
Short Bio: An-Chi is a Research Engineer in the Computational Earth Sciences Group. She has a Master's degree in Atmospheric Sciences (National Taiwan University), a Master's degree in Climate and Society (Columbia University), and a BSc in Atmospheric Sciences (National Taiwan University). In BSC, she is in charge of the development and maintenance of the in-house R tools.
Position: Junior Research Engineer
Contact: amalia.vradi@bsc.es
Short Bio: Amalia Vradi is a Junior Research Engineer in the Computational Earth Sciences Group. She holds a BSc in Informatics, and currently, she is undertaking a Master's in Innovation and Research in Informatics from the Polytechnic University of Catalunya, with a specialization in Data Science. In her work, she is working closely with the Atmospheric Composition group, developing tools that allow on-the-fly analysis of experiment output with respect to processed observational data.
MIRI Student
Position: Research Engineer
Interests: Advanced Computing, Algorithmics, Mathematics, Statistics, Probability.
I enjoy talking about movies, literature, music, and random topics.
Contact: wilmer.uruchi@bsc.es
Position: Research Engineer
Contact: daniel.trujillo@bsc.es
Interests: Software Engineering, Functional Programming, Big Data.
Short Bio: Daniel is a Research Engineer in the Data and Diagnostics Team from the Computational Earth Sciences group. He is a Software Engineer from the University of Jaén, and is finishing his end-of-master thesis on an Apache Spark-powered implementation of a classic rule extraction algorithm. He is currently working on the Quality Assessment of the Copernicus Climate Data Store toolbox, testing the tools provided to the users and its documentation.
Position: Research Engineer
Contact: sergi.palomas@bsc.es
Short Bio: Sergi is a Research Engineer in the Performance Team. He's got a bachelor in Computer Science from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and he is finishing the MSc in HPC at the Universitat Politècnica de Barcelona. Currently, he is in charge of the performance analysis of coupled experiments. Assessing Climate prediction and Atmospheric composition members to run their coupled experiments more efficiently by balancing multiple components (number of cores, mapping, scalability, etc.).
Position: Software Engineer
Contact: alejandro.alfonso@bsc.es
Short Bio: Alejandro is a Software Engineer with a bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Barcelona with experience in software development. Interested in the field of Data Science (Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Deep Learning algorithms) and application development (both web and mobile).
Position: Junior Research Engineer
Interests: HPC, Computer Sciences, Software Development
Contact: eloi.rodriguez@bsc.es - Linkedin
Position: Junior Research Engineer
Interests: Computer Sciences, Artificial Inteligence, Big data
Contact: eric.ferrer@bsc.es
Short bio: Eric Ferrer is a Computer Science's graduate for the university Jaume I of Castellón and has a master in robotics by the Ecole Centrale Nantes and Jaume I of Castellón. Joined the CES department in January 2021 to work in the workflows team.