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: Pre-exascale System Administration: MareNostrum5 @ BSC
MIRI-HPC
14 Apr, 2026
-
15 Apr, 2026
0.50
Credits
Description
The objective of this course is to explain the different components of MareNostrum 5 and to understand the design decisions taken. We also analyze how the system administration is taken in this pre-exascale system.
Prerequisites: Experience on Linux system administration is required.
AI has emerged as a powerful technology and it is expected it will impact all human activities and professional developments. Some deployments pose serious concern about its ethical implications.
The course reviews some of the recommendations and guidelines published related with AI developments. Also, the main regulations and laws are examined. The course addresses the ethics of two main areas: using AI tools for research, and doing research in AI.
Theoretical sessions are complemented with numerous examples and study cases.
Weekly research seminar that presents the latest results in Computer Graphics and Visualization and projects developed by the ViRVIG Group.
Schedule
10:30 - 11:30
Graphics Research Seminar
Currently in progress
MIRI-CGVR
18 Feb, 2026
-
24 Jun, 2026
2.00
Credits
Description
Weekly research seminar that presents the latest results in Computer Graphics and Visualization and projects developed by the ViRVIG Group.
Schedule
10:30 - 11:30
Research Seminar of the Department of Computer Science
Currently in progress
08 Oct, 2025
-
01 Jul, 2026
2.00
Credits
Description
Monthly research seminar held the first Wednesday of the month in room Omega S215 to present the latest results by members of the Department of Computer Science and visiting scientists.
Schedule
12:00
Past seminars
Ethics for Engineers, Researchers and Innovators (EthicsERI) 2025-2
27 Feb, 2026
-
27 Mar, 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.
BSC Training Course: Advanced Heterogeneous Programming on FPGAs with OmpSs@FPGA
MIRI-HPC
18 Mar, 2026
-
18 Mar, 2026
0.50
Credits
Description
This tutorial will introduce the audience to the BSC tools for heterogenous programming on FPGA devices. It describes OmpSs@FPGA, as a productive programming environment for compute systems with FPGAs.
BSC Training Course: Advanced Heterogeneous Programming on GPUs with MPI & OmpSs
MIRI-HPC
16 Mar, 2026
-
17 Mar, 2026
1.00
Credits
Description
The tutorial will motivate the audience on the need for portable, efficient programming models that put less pressure on program developers while still getting good performance for clusters and clusters with GPUs.
More specifically, the tutorial will:
Introduce the hybrid MPI/OmpSs parallel programming model for future exascale systems
Demonstrate how to use MPI/OmpSs to incrementally parallelize/optimize:
MPI applications on clusters of SMPs, and
Leverage CUDA kernels with OmpSs on clusters of GPUs
BSC Training Course: Advanced Performance Analysis and Tools
MIRI-HPC
11 Mar, 2026
-
12 Mar, 2026
1.00
Credits
Description
The objective of this course is to learn how Paraver and Dimemas tools can be used to analyze the performance of parallel applications and to familiarize with the tools usage as well as instrumenting applications with Extrae.
BSC Training Course: Programming of Petaflop Machine: MareNostrum5
MIRI-HPC
03 Mar, 2026
-
04 Mar, 2026
0.50
Credits
Description
The objective of this course is to present to potential users the new configuration of MareNostrum and a introduction on how to use the new system (batch system, compilers, hardware, MPI, etc). Also It will provide an introduction about RES infrastructures and how to get access to the supercomputing resources available.
TALENT ARENA is a space with more than 1,500 m2 of exhibition space, auditorium, workshops and sessions on Artificial Intelligence, Software Engineering, Data Science and Microchips. In addition, attendees will be able to access exclusive conferences with prominent industry speakers.
More information at: https://talentarena.tech/
Mandatory registration.
The objective of this course is to learn how to use systems with more than one memory subsystem. We will see the different options on using systems equipped with Intel's Optane Persistent Memory technology, but also looking forward to upcoming systems with HBM and CXL memories.
BSC Training Course: Programming Distributed Systems (COMPSs)
MIRI-HPC
03 Feb, 2026
-
04 Feb, 2026
1.00
Credits
Description
COMPSs is a programming model which is able to exploit the inherent concurrency of sequential applications and execute them in a transparent manner to the application developer in distributed computing platform. This is achieved by annotating part of the codes as tasks, and building at execution a task-dependence graph based on the actual data used consumed/produced by the tasks. The COMPSs runtime is able to schedule the tasks in the computing nodes and take into account facts like data locality and the different nature of the computing nodes in case of heterogeneous platforms. Additionally, recently COMPSs has been enhanced with the possibility of coordinating Web Services as part of the applications. COMPSs supports Java, C/C++ and Python as programming languages.
Consider the following scenario: we have a large database of gene sequences,
hundreds of thousands, even, millions (e.g. in GenBank). In order to enable
fast similarity search, clustering, phylogenetic reconstruction, etc. it is
usual to consider
the set of distinct k-mers of each sequence in the database (typical values of
k are around 20), but instead of using the full set of k-mers of each
sequence, we will use a sketch (a random sample) instead: computing the
similarity (Jaccard, cosine, ...) of the sketches yields accurate estimates of
the true similarities.
One problem that we face then is that of producing random samples for each
gene sequence in an efficient way. Practical constraints require, among other
things, that the algorithms can be parallelized and that the size n of the set
from which
we draw the samples is not known in advance.
Algorithms such as MinHash (mash) or bottom-k are easy, efficient and will
produce random samples of a given fixed size. Because the size of the sketches
is fixed in advance these schemes have limited accuracy and adapt poorly when
the database contains very different types of gene sequences (small/medium/
large sequences, low/high variability, ...). Recent proposals, such as
FracMinHash (sourmash) are also fast, simple and efficient, but produce random
samples of linear size w.r.t. the size n of "population". For FracMInHash,
similarity estimates are very accurate, but this is at the expense of bigger
sketches and, hence, larger processing times too.
In the talk I will describe my recent work on two sublinear random sampling
algorithms. The first is Affirmative Sampling (Lumbroso and M., 2022) which is
the first of its kind, as far as we know. Affirmative Samping is simple and
efficient, and its standard variant produces samples of (expected) size k
ln(n/k) + O(k), for a fixed parameter k. Another variant generates samples of
expected size Theta(n^alpha), for a given valua alpha, 0 < alpha < 1.
Unfortunately, parallelization of Affirmative Sampling will render different
samples depending on how the database is "split" among parallel threads, which
is not desirable in practice.
In a more recent work, we introduce MaxGeomHash (Hera, Koslicki and M.,
submitted) which admits "deterministic" parallelization, and has better
concentration around the expected size of the samples. The algorithm is also
very simple, and effcient in practice. The standard variant (MGH) produces
samples of expected size k log_2(n/k) + k + O(1), and variance is 1.215 ... k
+ o(1); for the variant alpha-MGH, 0 < alpha < 1, we have samples of expected
size is f(alpha) n^alpha + o(n^alpha), for a explicitly computable f(alpha),
and the variance is n^alpha + o(n^alpha). MGH achieves accuracy close to that
of FracMInHash, while only needing a fraction of the computational resources
needed by FracMInHash.
We will end briefly describing some of the applications and implications of
these algorithms, besides the initial example motivated in computational
biology.
Schedule
12:00¿13:00
Aula Lliure 2 ECTS (Semester 1)
07 Sep, 2025
-
07 Jan, 2026
2.00
Credits
Description
The 'Aula Lliure' project is designed so that early stage bachelor students can take advantage of the academic experience of more veteran students and thus improve their academic performance. The tuition language is catalan / spanish.
Note: you can claim 2 ECTS when, at least, you teach 8 lectures (of 2h) to 2 groups of students, for a total of 32h of lectures.
The 'Aula Lliure' project is designed so that early stage bachelor students can take advantage of the academic experience of more veteran students and thus improve their academic performance. The tuition language is catalan / spanish.
Note: you must claim 1 ECTS when you teach 8 lectures (of 2h) to 1 group of students, for a total of 16h of lectures.
Attendance to course SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT FOR GEOGRAPHIC AND SPATIAL INFORMATION
08 Sep, 2025
-
19 Dec, 2025
3.00
Credits
Description
Location: The sessions took place at UPC, Campus Nord.
Bitsxlamarato
12 Dec, 2025
-
14 Dec, 2025
2.00
Credits
Description
This is a hackaton organized, among others, by FIB within the charity event organized every Christmas by the Catalan Television (TV3) called "La Marató": https://www.ccma.cat/tv3/marato/ . The website is updated (and registration is opened) every year, by mid-November, the latest.
Ethics for Engineers, Researchers and Innovators (EthicsERI) 2025-1
07 Nov, 2025
-
05 Dec, 2025
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.
Lleidahack welcomes you to HackEPS 2025, the first hackathon in Lleida!
The seventh edition of the HackEPS will take place in the building of the Superior Technical School of the University in Lleida on November 22 and 23, 2025.
The participating students are expected to produce artefacts (solutions) at the level of, at least, master studies.
BSC Training Course: RISC-V principles for understanding how to freely develop new solutions
MIRI-HPC
10 Nov, 2025
-
12 Nov, 2025
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.
Responsible Conduct in Research and Innovation (RCiRI) 2025
03 Oct, 2025
-
31 Oct, 2025
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: Parallel Programming Workshop
MIRI-HPC
20 Oct, 2025
-
24 Oct, 2025
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.
Middle East Technical University (METU), Ankara, Turkey: 14¿25 July 2025
The EUMaster4HPC Summer School 2025, entitled High Performance Computing for Specialised Applications, will be held at Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara, Turkey, from 14 to 25 July 2025. METU is a prestigious institution renowned for its excellence in science, engineering, and technology education and research. Located in the heart of Turkey's capital, its state-of-the-art facilities and vibrant academic community make it an ideal venue for this specialised programme.
This summer school will cover the applications of HPC for specialised applications and innovative solutions related to Data Science, Modelling and Simulation, Chemistry, Aeronautics, Materials Science, Physics, and more. The summer school will focus on these applications and encourage further collaboration and integration among the participating students. The programme consists of three main parts: the academic programme, the industry programme, and the social programme.
