Profile of national HPC developments in Latin America - Part IV

In this series of posts, we present some of the national developments in high performance computing seen in Latin American countries. Following the discussion of the developments in Argentina and Brazil, Chile and Colombia, and Mexico, today we discuss Peru and Uruguay.

Peru

Although many universities and research institutions exist in Peruvian soil, no integrated national effort in HPC has been developed lately. For instance, the Peruvian Academic Network (RAAP) provides connectivity among national research institutions and to others in Latin America, but lacks computing resources to provide to its own members.

Nevertheless, not all hope is lost, as the San Pablo Catholic University (UCSP) is heading the proposal of a Center of Excellence in "High Performance Computing for the Research, Development and Technological Research for Urban Centers' Problems". This initiative is competing with five other center of excellence proposals to be funded by the Peruvian National Council of Science, Technology and Technological Inovation (CONCYTEC). This Center of Excellence in HPC will be developed in cooperation with Brazilian, French, German, and North American universities, and Peruvian companies. Besides its research focus, this center also aims to promote the training and education of master, doctoral and post-doctoral personnel with the support of the collaboration network.

Uruguay

Uruguay does not have national policies and agencies to support the development of high performance computing research and development in the country. Additionally, most of its universities and research centers are in Montevideo, the country's capital. Nevertheless, the country had only one public university - the University of the Republic (URU), which counts with over 100,000 students and 10,000 faculty members - until recently. In this sense, the HPC efforts developed in URU could be seen as national developments.

The University of the Republic expanded its efforts in HPC with the creation of the Interdisciplinary Center for Scientific High Performance Computing (NICCAD) in 2010 with the joint work of 20 different research groups. NICCAD aims to promote the integration of researchers with varied backgrounds in order to solve diverse scientific problems using HPC techniques. To run scientific applications on domains such as fluid dynamics and biomolecular simulations, researchers rely solely in the FING cluster, a heterogeneous cluster composed of Dell Power and HP Proliant nodes funded by the own university that provides 5 TFlops of performance over 440 cores and 848GB of memory.