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.

Intel to open new R&D laboratory in Costa Rica

A new Intel "mega-laboratory" for research and development will open this year in Costa Rica. The new mega-lab will carry out testing and quality control operations for the entire product portfolio before they go on to manufacturing. The new laboratory should start operations in a couple of months, as announced by Intel, and is planning to open about 350 new positions. In addition to the new R&D laboratory, there are ongoing discussions between the Costa Rican government and Intel to open a new laboratory for small and medium sized businesses to share knowledge and collaborate, as a way to spark new initiatives and promote the entrepreneurship in the country.

This new R&D laboratory is a great opportunity to incubate and expand the HPC knowledge in the region. As the purpose of the lab is to test and validate Intel products, Highly skilled engineers will develop more expertise in code parallelization and highly efficient optimization techniques that improve efficiency of HPC applications in terms of time to completion, but also in terms of energy consumption. Furthermore, the new mega-lab is expected to fuel the HPC development in the region, as undergraduate and graduate student do internships in the lab and universities develop collaboration projects with Intel that can lead to new high performance software leveraging features of the Intel products being tested. This initiative could even spark a new IPCC in the region.

The new laboratory comes as wave of fresh air to Costa Rica, as the giant chip manufacturer closed their chip assembly plant in Costa Rica last year. A total of 1500 employees lost their job as part of this restructuring operation. "The best long-term solution to maximize global operational efficiency and effectiveness is to close its assembly and testing operations in Costa Rica" announced Intel in a statement last year. Intel has been operating in Costa Rica since 1997 and produced over $2 billions in annual exports, which represents about 20% of the Costa Rica annual exports. 

While the number of new jobs opened by the new R&D laboratory is just a fraction of the previous manufacturing line, this still represents a great opportunity for engineers and future graduates in the region. Joining the movement, the cloud computing company VMware announced recently that they will be expanding their team in Costa Rica to reach 400 employees in 2015. VMware started operations in Costa Rica in 2012 with only 3 employees. Their quick expansion in the region has been seen as a positive sign for the cloud computing market in Latin America.

Profile of national HPC developments in Latin America - Part III

In this series of posts, we present some of the national developments in high performance computing seen in Latin American countries. Following parts I (Argentina and Brazil), and II (Chile and Colombia), today we discuss Mexico's developments.

Mexico - National Supercomputing Centers and Network

Mexico is one of countries most engaged in high performance computing in Latin America. Their commitment at a national level is visible in different ways. For instance, the Mexican Supercomputing Network (RedMexSu) interconnects seventeen supercomputing centers, universities, and research institutions in the country.  RedMexSu's activities in HPC include the development of infrastructure, services, and training. In order to promote collaboration among its member, it counts with funding to support missions for researchers from graduate level and above.

Mexico counts with two national laboratories, namely the supercomputing efforts at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), and the National Supercomputing Center (CNS) at the San Luis Potosi Institute of Scientific Research and Technology (IPICyT). LARTop50 lists UNAM's Miztli supercomputer as the fastest supercomputer in Latin America with a theoretical peak performance of 120 TFlops. Nevertheless, access to Miztli is restricted to UNAM faculty. Meanwhile, CNS provides access to its own supercomputer, named Thubat-Kaal, to Mexican researchers and foreign collaborators. Thubat-Kaal provides 115 TFlops of performance split into 140 2xIntel Xeon nodes and 25 nodes with the same processors plus two Xeon Phi ones. This kind of access to supercomputing infrastructure is very important for the development of research in Latin America.

Finally, Mexico has already announced the development of a third national laboratory. The National Supercomputing Laboratory of the Southeast of Mexico (Laboratorio Nacional de Supercómputo del Sureste de México, or LNS), as it is named, will be held at the Meritorious Autonomous University of Puebla (BUAP). This national center is expected to help in the development of southeastern part of Mexico. For that, it will count with a supercomputer recently bought from Fujitsu, which is anticipated to provide between 100 and 200 TFlops of computing power and to include both Intel Xeon Phi and Nvidia CUDA accelerators. Expect to read more about LNS as its development unfolds this year.

Latin America hosts one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world

That's right, a supercomputer as powerful as the top 2 machine on the most recent Top500 list has its home in the Atacama desert in Chile. Although it may not run the traditional HPC software, it certainly enables cutting-edge scientific exploration.

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) is a collection of high-precision antennas that work together as a giant telescope. Using high resolution and sensitivity, ALMA provides a window to understand the origin of the universe.  The antennas are installed in the dry Atacama desert at more than 5,000 meters above sea level. Those conditions are ideal for the type of instrument ALMA embodies.

The general idea of the array of antennas is to capture a signal from the sky by two or more antennas and combine them to analyze the signal and get more information about its source. Images result from combining radio waves collected by different antennas. Therefore, ALMA has the ability to photograph the sky and provide valuable information on the life of galaxies. The proper orientation of the antenna collection is of such precision that it is necessary to run heavy computations. Such information makes it possible to have the antennas precisely pointing at the same region of the sky and have coherent signals that will later be combined into a single image. The computation is carried out by a supercomputer, called the ALMA Correlator.

The correlator can be thought as ALMA's brain; without it, the antenna collection wouldn't work properly. The correlator takes signals from the antennas as input, and produces astronomic data for further analysis. The goal of this process is to multiply the signals from the antennas. The result is saved into files called visibilities, which will later be used to make the images. The correlator contains 134 million processors capable of performing 17 quadrillion operations. It requires 140 kilowatts to cool down the processors. In part, such power consumption is due to the thin air of the Atacama desert. High altitude also precludes the use of hard disks, hence the correlator is diskless.

The correlator was built and installed by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and funded by the US National Science Fundation (NSF). It is a fundamental part of the ALMA's puzzle and it is already providing the information necessary to understand how planets, galaxies, and stars form.

For more information about the project, please visit http://www.almaobservatory.org.

New call for proposals STIC-AmSud

In a previous post we presented the regional program STIC-AmSud, which is an initiative to establish collaboration between France and the South American countries to enhance the research networks in the field of information and communication technologies. In this post, we will present the new call for proposals and we will be covering the most important details that you need to know if you want to apply for this call.

Researchers applying for this call should target collaborations that facilitate mobility and participation in workshops and intensive schools for students and professors. The theme needs to be strongly related to information and communication technologies and it should propose innovative directions in this domain. Projects will have a duration of two years, but a report of accomplishments should be submitted at the end of the first year, to continue receiving support during the second year. Projects should involve one French research group and at least two South American research groups. Research groups may belong to research laboratories, public or private, academic institutions or companies.

Concerning the funding, the maximum approved budget is between EUR 10,000 and EUR 15,000 per project per year, although different agencies have their own different regulations. The resources will be delivered annually. Projects submissions should mention their other funding sources and indicate the requested funding for each agency involved in the project. This budget should be used for missions between France and the south american teams involved in the project. It is recommended that missions last less than one week. At least one travel to France and one travel to South America must be done during the duration of the project. Teams are encouraged to organize at least one workshop in South America with all the project participants. It is also important to notice that researchers can participate in several projects but they can benefit from missions from a single project.

The selection criteria includes the innovative nature of the projects, the capacity to involve students and young researchers, the background of the involved teams and their complementarity, the capacity to exchange expertise and innovation, and in particular projects including technology transfers will be appreciated. Teams must pay attention to the regulations, coordinate and protect the intellectual property of the research projects developed under this initiative.

It is important to notice that this program can be used for the development of collaborations in HPC, as was the case of the Latin American Grid for Climate project. This project was a continuation of the GBRAMS-AMSUD project, and resulted in the development of a grid between partners in Argentina, Brazil, Peru, and Uruguay in order to simulate the climate for ten years in different regions of Latin America.

The call for proposals was open on December 15th 2014 and will close on May 15th 2015. The results will be published on November 2015 and the projects should start on January 2016. For more information please visit the STIC AmSud website.