Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Polytechnic University of Catalonia, also known as BarcelonaTech or UPC, is a public polytechnic university in Spain. It operates 18 schools across six Catalan cities and, as of the 2024-25 academic year, has over 30,000 students and more than 3,000 teaching and research staff.
The institution was established as the Polytechnic University of Barcelona in March 1971, formed from state technical schools of architecture and engineering with origins in the mid-19th century. It was officially renamed the Polytechnic University of Catalonia in 1984.
In the 2025 QS World University Rankings by subject, UPC ranked 97th worldwide in Engineering and Technology. The university also places in the world's top 50 for architecture, civil engineering, electrical and electronic engineering, and telecommunications engineering. According to the El Mundo annual university ranking, UPC ranks first in Spain in civil engineering, computer science, and mechanical engineering.
MareNostrum is a supercomputer installed in January 2005 inside the Torre Girona chapel, co-managed by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, UPC, and the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science. In 2023, a newer version called MareNostrum 5 was inaugurated at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. The center was founded by Mateo Valero Cortés, who earned his PhD in telecommunications engineering from UPC.
Graduates include Anna Kiesenhofer, who earned a PhD in Mathematics from UPC and won the gold medal in the women's road race at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, and Matthias Maurer, a German ESA astronaut who studied materials science at UPC and joined the SpaceX Crew-3 mission to the International Space Station. Carme Pigem Barceló, who studied at UPC's Vallès School of Architecture, co-founded the Pritzker Prize-winning firm RCR Arquitectes. Oriol Vinyals, a co-inventor of the seq2seq model and a machine-learning researcher at DeepMind, also studied telecommunications engineering at UPC.
The UPC Science Fiction Award was organized and awarded annually by the university's Board of Trustees from 1991 to 2010 and has since been presented biannually. Brandon Sanderson won in 2007 for Defending Elysium, and Roberto Sanhueza is the only author to have won the award twice, in 2009 for Bis and again in 2014 for El año del gato.