The Barcelona Supercomputing Center, established in 2005, serves as the National Supercomputing Facility in Spain. The mission of BSC is to research, develop and manage information technologies in order to facilitate scientific progress. The Computer Sciences Department of the BSC focuses on building upon currently available hardware and software technologies and adapting them to make efficient use of computing infrastructures. The department proposes novel architectures for processors and memory hierarchy and develops programming models and innovative implementation approaches for these models, as well as tools for performance analysis and prediction. The Computer Architecture for Parallel Paradigms research group specializes in computer architecture and hardware in general, with special applicability to designing multi-core systems for performance and lowpower while leveraging novel programming models and runtimes.