European Processor Initiative Milestone: Release of Processor Test Chip for Fabrication

The HPC User Forum was established in 1999 to promote the health of the global HPC industry and address issues of common concern to users. In May 2021, the 76th HPC User Forum took place virtually. This update summarizes a presentation from that virtual conference given by Sanzio Bassini, Director of SuperCalculation, Applications & Innovation Dept. at the CINECA consortium. He is currently a member of the EuroHPC Infrastructure Advisory Board and Leader of the EuroHPC Italian Pre-Exascale Infrastructure Leonardo Project. Bassini provided important updates on CINECA’s family of supercomputers, their evolving use cases and applications, as well as their plans to expand capabilities and continue empowering research scientists in Europe and around the world.

Recently, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) trained the first large artificial intelligence (AI) model designed to understand, speak, and write in the Spanish language. The system, named MarIA, was trained on the MareNostrum supercomputer at the BSC, leveraging 59 TBs of language data from the Biblioteca Nacional de España, one of the world's largest public libraries. The model is said to be an expert in both writing and understanding the Spanish language and is free to use by any developer, company, or entity. The system has a wide variety of potential applications including summarization applications, chatbots, smart searches, translation engines, and automatic subtitling chatbots.