Profile of national HPC developments in Latin America - Part II

In this series of posts, we present some of the national developments in high performance computing seen in Latin American countries. In part I, we focused on Argentina and Brazil. Today, we address Chile and Colombia.

Chile - NLHPC

Chile's National Laboratory for High Performance Computing (NLHPC) was created by the University of Chile (UChile) in conjunction with seven other universities. Its creation was based on an estimated demand for HPC resources by 50 research groups. NLHPC is led by the Center for Mathematical Modeling (CMM) of UChile. It focuses on providing HPC services and training for the scientific and industrial public of Chile.

NLHPC maintains two of the most performing supercomputers of Latin America as reported by LARTop50: Leftraru (number 2), composed of HP computing nodes with Intel Xeon and  Xeon Phi processors; and Lefque (number 10), composed of IBM computing nodes with Intel Xeon processors. Some other smaller computing resources of this laboratory are distributed among the participating universities. They are all interconnected through the Chilean National University Network (REUNA). Academic and industrial partners may request access to these resources by submitting a project to NLHPC.

Colombia

Surprisingly enough, Colombia shows no unified national HPC laboratory or funding system. Even though Colombia has great research centers employing HPC, such as the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (BIOS), and Colombian institutions are major participants in international initiatives, such as the Advanced Computing Service for Latin America and the Caribbean (SCALAC) and the RISC project, only Grid Colombia is discussed at the national level and no information can be found about it.

In a more general level, its National Academic Network of Advanced Technology (RENATA) interconnects over 160 Colombian institutions among themselves and the world. RENATA supplies services, tools, and infrastructure to help scientific production. Grid Colombia is said to be one of its projects. One of its most interesting services for HPC right now is RENATA Funding Pivot, which provides tools to help find funding opportunities (which could be turned into HPC resources).