Seminars of Innovation and Research in Informatics
SIRI is organized into activities, to be evaluated separately, that you can choose from a diverse set of offered activities. The offer of activities is varied and there is a certain degree of choice for the student. Eventually, each student must take enough activities as to add up to 6 ECTS. Below, you will find a summary of the list of activities that are currently being offered, other upcoming seminars and those that have already passed during this academic year.
To access all the information about the seminars, please, log in into Racó / Groups / Seminars. There, you will find some further details and instructions to enroll. Importantly, the enrolment to the activities announced in this list should be directly done by the students with the organizers of the activity. To certify the attendance to these activities and submit the documentation required to be evaluated.
BSC Training Course: Parallel Programming Workshop
MIRI-HPC
19 Oct, 2026
-
23 Oct, 2026
2.50
Credits
Description
The objectives of this course are to understand the fundamental concepts supporting message-passing and shared memory programming models. The course covers the two widely used programming models: MPI for the distributed-memory environments, and OpenMP for the shared-memory architectures. The course also presents the main tools developed at BSC to get information and analyze the execution of parallel applications, Paraver and Extrae.
It also presents the Parallware Assistant tool, which is able to automatically parallelize a large number of program structures, and provide hints to the programmer with respect to how to change the code to improve parallelization. It deals with debugging alternatives, including the use of GDB and Totalview. The use of OpenMP in conjunction with MPI to better exploit the shared-memory capabilities of current compute nodes in clustered architectures is also considered. Paraver will be used along the course as the tool to understand the behavior and performance of parallelized codes. The course is taught using formal lectures and practical/programming sessions to reinforce the key concepts and set up the compilation/execution environment.
Responsible Conduct in Research and Innovation (RCiRI) 2026
09 Oct, 2026
-
06 Nov, 2026
2.00
Credits
Description
All human activities have implications on our society. Research activity not only does but also the overall research system is based on trust. Then, responsible research conduct is of outmost importance. The goal of the course is to provide an overview of the rules and professional practices that are considered as responsible conduct of research and engineering. Ph. D. students, post-doctoral researchers and everybody involved in research and innovation must know the principles and practices that define a responsible conduct and the ones that are not appropriate and are identified as misconduct.
Topics include:
Introduction on Responsible Research and Innovation
Research misconduct
Authorship
Plagiarism
Peer reviews
Conflicts of interest
Mentor/mentee relationship
Collaborative research
Presenting the results
Intellectual Property
Information Privacy
BSC Training Course: RISC-V principles for understanding how to freely develop new solutions
MIRI-HPC
23 Nov, 2026
-
25 Nov, 2026
1.50
Credits
Description
RISC-V is an open instruction set standard which is experiencing extraordinary growth all over the world in numerous areas of focus ranging from HPC & ML to the data center to embedded computing. The standardization activities are community driven by expert members (from industry, academia and individuals). BSC is one of the community members that is contributing to the ecosystem. This course is an opportunity to get familiar with technical aspects of the standard through a combination of lectures and hands-on sessions.
This course identifies topics that are both fundamental to computer architecture and relevant to the design of RISC-V based solutions of the future. The emphasis is always on insights that will be useful to the (under)graduate student, whether he/she goes on for a PhD or joins a software or hardware development team. We will deal with principles, trade-offs, and implementation details related to the RISC-V standard. Along the course, the students will get familiar with some layers of the RISC-V software and hardware stacks using a learning-by-doing methodology. This will provide a mechanism to the students to understand the RISC-V ecosystem, BSC know-how and activities related to RISC-V, and explore the potential of the ISA to freely develop new technologies..
Topics will cover aspects like: how to boot an operating system, how to deploy a container and execute an application, how to tune an algorithm for improving its performance through the addition of custom instructions, and finally, how to improve the performance of an HPC application by taking advantage of the RISC-V Vector extension.
Ethics for Engineers, Researchers and Innovators (EthicsERI) 2026-1
13 Nov, 2026
-
11 Dec, 2026
2.00
Credits
Description
All human activities have implications on our society. Professional exercise in engineering, being a researcher or running innovation projects imply making decisions that are not exclusively technical, they involve ethical considerations. Theoretical sessions are complemented with numerous examples and cases.
We would like to share a brief update regarding the activities in the Advanced Data Structures course of the MIRI Master's Program this academic term. As one of the research components of the subject, students were encouraged to participate in the Indexing Challenge organized by the International Conference on Similarity Search and Applications, SISAP 2026 (https://www.sisap.org/2026/indexingchallenge.html). As a result we are pleased to report that five short papers authored by five master student teams ---involving seven students in total-- have been accepted for presentation at the conference:
Aftab Ahmed Choudhry:
Hardware-Sympathetic Optimization for High-Dimensional Vector Search
Eneko Sabaté Iturgaiz:
NMF-IVF: Learning Latent Semantic Topics for Approximate Retrieval
Luis Solsona Sánchez and Luis Fernando Chávez Quevedo:
Memory-Bounded Approximate Nearest Neighbour Search for Dense, MIPS, and Sparse Vectors: SISAP 2026 Indexing Challenge
Sergi Guimerà Roig and Iván Sánchez Gala:
PiPNN for k-NN Graph Construction: Inverse-Size Merging and Diversified Beam Search
Roger Canal:
Static InvertedBlock Indexing and Parameterized Search for Approximate MIPS over Learned Sparse Representations
Thanks to support from the ALBCOM project, travel funding will be provided for the students to attend the conference and present their results in person.
Additionally, Àlex Font, former MIRI student (2024-2026) and current PhD candidate, is also presenting a research paper in SISAP 2026, based upon his master thesis defended past July.
In connection with this, a short CS departmental seminar will be held where the students will present an overview of their work. Details are provided below.
¿¿¿¿¿¿
Seminar Announcement
-------------
Date: dimecres, 07 de octubre de 2026
Time: 12:00 h
Place: Sala C6-003, Campus Nord UPC
Title: SISAP accepted papers (various speakers)
Abstract
The SISAP 2026 Indexing Challenge
(https://sisap-challenges.github.io/2026/index.html) ¿part of the SISAP 2026
(Similarity Search and Applications) conference¿ focuses on advancing state-
of-the-art similarity search and indexing techniques across diverse data
modalities and scalability benchmarks. This session highlights innovative
approaches to address the complex computational and structural bottlenecks
inherent in high-dimensional and large-scale retrieval tasks. To showcase
these developments, four short technical presentations will be delivered, each
introducing original and efficient solutions tailored to the challenge's
distinct tasks. These are:
*Luis Solsona Sánchez and Luis Fernando Chávez Quevedo:
Memory-Bounded Approximate Nearest Neighbour Search for Dense, MIPS, and
Sparse Vectors: SISAP 2026 Indexing Challenge
* Aftab Ahmed Choudhry:
Hardware-Sympathetic Optimization for High-Dimensional Vector Search
* Eneko Sabaté Iturgaiz:
NMF-IVF: Learning Latent Semantic Topics for Approximate Retrieval
* Sergi Guimerà Roig and Iván Sánchez Gala:
PiPNN for k-NN Graph Construction: Inverse-Size Merging and Diversified Beam
Search
The talks will cover key methodological breakthroughs, experimental
evaluations, and practical insights gained from tackling real-world indexing
constraints.
This seminar will conclude with a short talk by Àlex Font, former MIRI
student, where he will present the work that was accepted as a full regular
paper at the SISAP 2026 main conference (https://sisap.org/2026).
* Àlex Font, Conrado Martínez, Mahmudur R. Hera and David Koslicki:
A Detailed Analysis of MaxGeomHash Sketches
Schedule
12:00 hrs
Respira Hackaton
01 Oct, 2026
-
03 Oct, 2026
2.00
Credits
Description
The First CIBER International Hackathon on Respiratory Diseases
CIBERES and AstraZeneca are jointly organising the first CIBER International Hackathon in the field of respiratory diseases, an event designed to bring together healthcare, technology and talent to develop innovative responses to challenges in this area.
The Barcelona School of Informatics (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya ¿ BarcelonaTech) and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS) are also collaborating in the organisation of the event, contributing their expertise and advanced computing capabilities to enable participants to develop the best technological solutions to the challenges presented.
La descripció es troba a:
https://sisap-challenges.github.io/2026/index.html#sisap_2026_indexing_challenge_task_description_and_participation_details
EUMaster4HPC Summer School 2026
05 Jul, 2026
-
14 Jul, 2026
3.00
Credits
Description
The EUMaster4HPC Summer School 2026 entitled HPC and Emerging Trends, will take place at the Youth Center Marienthal and at the beautiful premises of the University of Luxembourg in Belval, from 5 to 14 July 2026.
The University of Luxembourg is a leading European research university, renowned for its excellence in science, engineering, and technology. Its modern facilities and vibrant academic community provide an inspiring environment for this specialised programme.
BSC Training Course: Introduction to SYLC Programming
MIRI-HPC
10 Jul, 2026
-
10 Jul, 2026
0.50
Credits
Description
This course introduces the principles of SYCL as a modern approach to heterogeneous programming in C++. Its objective is to equip participants with the knowledge and practical skills to develop efficient parallel applications across diverse hardware platforms. Through a balance of theory and hands-on practice, attendees will gain an understanding of SYCL's programming model, learn how to manage memory and computation effectively, and apply tools for performance analysis. By the end of the course, participants will be able to design, implement, and optimize SYCL applications with confidence, preparing them to tackle real-world scientific and industrial workloads.
This is an expansion of the topic "OpenACC and other approaches to GPU computing" covered on last years editions of the Introduction to CUDA Programming. This course is delivered by the GPU Center of Excellence (GCOE) awarded by NVIDIA to the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) in association with Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC). It will provide very good introduction to the PUMPS Summer School run jointly with NVIDIA - Further information on the 2023 PUMPS Summer school will follow soon. As an NVIDIA GPU Center of Excellence, BSC and UPC are deeply involved in research and outreach activities around GPU Computing. OpenACC is a high-level, directive-based programming model for GPU computing. It is a very convenient language to leverage the GPU power with minimal code modifications, being the preferred option for non computer scientists. This course will cover the necessary topics to get started with GPU programming in OpenACC, as well as some advanced topics.
BSC Training Course: Introduction to CUDA Programming
MIRI-HPC
06 Jul, 2026
-
08 Jul, 2026
1.50
Credits
Description
The aim of this course is to provide students with knowledge and hands-on experience in developing applications software for processors with massively parallel computing resources. In general, we refer to a processor as massively parallel if it has the ability to complete more than 64 arithmetic operations per clock cycle. Many commercial offerings from NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel already offer such levels of concurrency. Effectively programming these processors will require in-depth knowledge about parallel programming principles, as well as the parallelism models, communication models, and resource limitations of these processors.
Graduate School for the Symposium on Computer Animation 2026:
https://computeranimation.org/
MESIO Summer School (1 course)
22 Jun, 2026
-
06 Jul, 2026
1.00
Credits
Description
The MESIO UPC-UB Summer School is a specialized training program that increases the supply of both professional and research training in the field of Statistics and Mathematics. The courses are open to students from master's degrees. The Summer School courses are taught by renowned visiting professors as well as professors of the UPC and UB.
The 2026 edition includes 12 activities scheduled from June 22th to July 10th, 2026. These courses will be conducted 'face-to-face' and will also be streamed live.
https://mesioupcub.masters.upc.edu/en/xix-summer-school-2026/courses-p
IMPORTANT NOTE: each course is 15h. Once you enrol you must confirm you want to be evaluated. Then, you must conduct the required exercises / training / etc. to pass the course. For each passed course you will receive a certificate.
If you just attend one course, you get 1 ECTS. For attending two courses 2 ECTS. For attending 3 courses 3 ECTS. You cannot claim more than 3 ECTS this way. Be sure to choose the correct SIRI event (there are three, depending on the number of courses taken and the ECTS you want to claim).
