Latin american children meet HPC

As a follow up of our previous post about teaching HPC to undergraduate students, in this post we go beyond that, we want to reach children! Of course, we are not talking about asking a ten-years old to program a hardware device with thousands of cores. We are talking about the importance of exposing children to the HPC world from early education stages. In the same way children are capable to understand what a telescope or a microscope is, they also should be able to have some basic notions about one of the most important tools for scientific discovery: supercomputers. But we should not ask them to understand the intricate technical details about how a supercomputer works; what is important is to explain them what is a supercomputer, what is it used for and the advantages that they offer to many scientific domains. This is critical to awake the curiosity of young generations and to motivate them to go into science and technology careers.

In this ground, Chile is already several steps ahead. Indeed, the National Laboratory for High Performance Computing (home of the Leftraru supercomputer) organized several visits from high schools students to the laboratory. First, about fifteen girls from the Liceo Carmela Carvajal de Prat were received by the scientific director Jaime San Martin, the project manager Susana Cabello, and the technology manager Gines Guerrero. They received several informal talks explaining the purpose of supercomputers, what they look like and how they are used for different purposes. In addition, the engineer Alex Di Genova explained how HPC is important for bioinformatic research. The turn of the gentlemen came several days later, when about thirty boys from the National Institute visited the premises of the NLHPC. Again, the main concepts of HPC were explain in short talks, but this time astrophysics took the place as the emblematic scientific application, when Dr. Francisco Corster explained them the critical importance of scientific modeling to understand the behavior of the universe and its cosmic bodies.

Other laboratories across Latin America should follow similar strategies. These visits are not only extremely stimulating to children, but they also help to pave the way for the future bright generation of Latin American young scientist and engineers.