The Role of University Centers in Promoting HPC in Latin America

The development of a competitive high performance computing platform in a country requires the concerted effort of different agents: government, academia, society, and industry. Ideally, a coordinated strategy of all the aforementioned parties would put HPC on the fast track. If  governmental agencies design policies to effectively support the investment on HPC equipment and human capital, academic institutions and companies will efficiently organize teams to chase the funding opportunities. Society must ensure that their taxes are well spent on initiatives that improve their quality of life and open new business directions.

There is, however, an entity that has historically played a key role in developing HPC projects with high impact for society. University centers, attached either to academic, administrative, or technical departments, are units strategically located to spark fundamental initiatives in HPC. Here are some of the reasons why:

• Proximity to scientist and engineers, which makes university centers aware of the most relevant  and challenging problems in science and engineering that require huge amounts of computation, storage, and analysis to solve. Therefore, university centers are most likely to understand the need for HPC.
• Funding availability, either because the center has an annual budget that includes equipment, training, and even discretionary funds, or because it is close to upper management where the case can be made to provide HPC platforms for the university. Thus, university centers may be able to cover the cost of HPC.
• The right size and dynamics, because university centers are usually relatively small units that can be reconfigured in a short amount of time to accommodate the requirements of new platforms for advanced computing. In a world where technologies may change frequently and abruptly, university centers are able to cope with the dynamics of HPC.

In summary, university centers have all the connections necessary to promote HPC at the institutional level. For instance, the centers may have contacts with equipment and service providers that may be able to install advanced computing infrastructure. Also, the centers may understand what problems in society have a higher impact and prioritize those problems in their agenda.

If a university center decides to take on the HPC challenge, it must come up with a plan to wisely invest the resources in addressing the problems with higher impact. There are some fundamental tasks in the plan to develop HPC. Here is a list of them:

• Equipment. There is no HPC without the right advanced computing infrastructure. Providing the scientific and engineering community with the right hardware is fundamental in achieving a highly efficient HPC platform. In achieving that, the center directors must clearly understand the technical requirements of their potential users: computation, network, storage, applications, frameworks, and more. Surveying those requirements is important since different communities may lie on different ends of the big-compute big-data spectrum.
• Training. Reaching high efficiency on the HPC platform needs the users to make use of the right programming tool in the right way. That is why the university center should also offer a rich portfolio of training opportunities. Either by developing local experts, or by bringing someone from abroad, proper training sessions may inspire new ways to solve problems and help people overcome the learning curve.
• Networking. One of the, often overlooked, roles of the centers is to serve as a meeting point for computational scientists and engineers. By organizing workshops, conferences, and competitions, the centers may achieve the important goal of putting people together and start collaborations on fascinating problems.
• Alliances. As the center becomes more savvy on HPC matters, it will find itself in a good position to contact equipment providers, scientists and engineers,  application developers, policy makers, students, and more. Strengthening those alliances will certainly increase the potential of their goals. 

Not surprisingly, Latin America offers several examples of university centers that have taken on the task of leading the promotion of HPC in their institutions. One example is the Center for Mathematical Modeling (CMM) at the University of Chile. Created in 2000, the CMM has pushed the idea of using advanced computing infrastructure to simulate challenging mathematical models. That quest has made the CMM install some of the most powerful supercomputers in Chile in the recent years. The CMM is now the leader in the development of the National Laboratory for High Performance Computing in Chile. Another example is the Center for High Performance Computing (CCAD) of the University of Córdoba, Argentina. The CCAD has been a constant advocate of using HPC resources to solve important problems in science and engineering. In fact, the CCAD hosts Mendieta, the most powerful Argentinian supercomputer.