“The RISC2 project has proven to be a team effort in which European and Latin American partners worked together to drive HPC collaboration forward. We have been able to create a lively and active community across the Atlantic to stimulate dialogue and boost cooperation that won’t die with RISC2’s formal end”, says Fabrizio Gagliardi, manager director of RISC2.

Since 2021, this knowledge-sharing network has organised webinars, summer schools, meetings with policymakers and participated in conferences and dissemination events on both sides of the Atlantic. The project also resulted in the HPC Observatory Repository — a collection of documents and training materials produced as part of the project – and the White Paper on HPC R&I Collaboration Opportunities, a document that reviews the key socio-economic and environmental factors and trends that influence HPC needs.

These were two of the issues highlighted by European Commission officials and experts during the final evaluation of the project, which could provide continuity to the work carried out by the consortium over the last three years, in line with the wishes of the partners and the advice of the evaluators. “Beyond RISC2, we should keep the momentum and leverage the importance of Latin America in the frame of the Green Deal actions: HPC stakeholders should encourage policymakers to build bilateral agreements and offer open calls focused on HPC collaboration“, reflects Fabrizio Gagliardi.

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The session began with a welcome and introduction by Mateo Valero (BSC), one of the main drivers of this cooperation and a leading name in the field of HPC. This intervention was later complemented by Fabrizio Gagliardi (BSC). Afterward, Elsa Carvalho (INESC TEC) presented the work done in terms of communication by the RISC2 team, an important segment for all the news and achievements to reach all the partners and countries involved.

Carlos J. Barrios Hernandez then presented the work done within the HPC Observatory, a relevant source of information that European and Latin American research organizations can address with HPC and/or AI issues.

The session closed with an important and pertinent debate on how to strengthen cooperation in HPC between the European Union and Latin America, in which all participants contributed and gave their opinion, committing to efforts so that the work developed within the framework of RISC2 is continued.

What our partners had to say about the meeting?

Rafael Mayo Garcia, CIEMAT:

“The policy event organized by RISC2 in Brussels was of utmost importance for the development of HPC and digital capabilities for a shared infrastructure between EU and LAC. Even more, it has had crucial contributions to international entities such as CYTED, the Ibero-American Programme for the Development of Science and Technology. On the CIEMAT side, it has been a new step beyond for building and participating in a HPC shared ecosystem.”

Esteban Meneses, CeNAT:

“In Costa Rica, CeNAT plays a critical role in fostering technological change. To achieve that goal, it is fundamental to synchronize our efforts with other key players, particularly government institutions. The event policy in Brussels was a great opportunity to get closer to our science and technology ministry and start a dialogue on the importance of HPC, data science, and artificial intelligence for bringing about the societal changes we aim for.”

Esteban Mocskos, UBA:

“The Policy Event recently held in Brussels and organized by the RISC2 project had several remarkable points. The gathering of experts in HPC research and management in Latin America and Europe served to plan the next steps in the joint endeavor to deepen the collaboration in this field. The advance in management policies, application optimization, and user engagement are fundamental topics treated during the main sessions and also during the point-to-point talks in every corner of the meeting room.
I can say that this meeting will also spawn different paths in these collaboration efforts that we’ll surely see their results during the following years with a positive impact on both sides of this fruitful relationship: Latin America and Europe.”

Sergio Nesmachnow, Universidad de la República:

“The National Supercomputing Center (Uruguay) and Universidad de la República have led the development of HPC strategies and technologies and their application to relevant problems in Uruguay. Specific meetings such as the policy event organized by RISC2 in Brussels are key to present and disseminate the current developments and achievements to relevant political and technological leaders in our country, so that they gain knowledge about the usefulness of HPC technologies and infrastructure to foster the development of national scientific research in capital areas such as sustainability, energy, and social development. It was very important to present the network of collaborators in Latin America and Europe and to show the involvement of institutional and government agencies.

Within the contacts and talks during the organization of the meeting, we introduced the projecto to national authorities, including the National Director of Science and Technology, Ministry of Education and Culture, and the President of the National Agency for Research and Innovation, as well as the Uruguayan Agency for International Cooperation and academic authorities from all institutions involved in the National Supercomputing Center initiative. We hope the established contacts can result in productive joint efforts to foster the development of HPC and related scientific areas in our country and the region.”

Carla Osthoff, LNCC:

“In Brazil, LNCC is critical in providing High Performance Computing Resources for the Research Community and training Human Resources and fostering new technologies. The policy event organized by RISC2 in Brussels was fundamental to synchronizing LNCC efforts with other government institutions and international  entities. On the LNCC side, it has been a new step beyond building and participating in an HPC-shared ecosystem.

Specific meetings such as the policy event organized by RISC2 in Brussels  were very important to present the network of collaborators in Latin America and Europe and to show the involvement of institutional and government agencies.

As a result of joint activities in research and development in the areas of information and communication technologies (ICT), artificial intelligence, applied mathematics, and computational modelling, with emphasis on the areas of scientific computing and data science, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) have been signed between LNCC and Inria/France. As a  result of new joint activities, LNCC and INESC TEC/Portugal are starting  collaboration through INESC TEC International Visiting Researcher Programme 2023.”

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As the coordinator of the High Performance Computing Center (Nacad) at COPPE/UFRJ, Alvaro Coutinho, presented advances in AI in Engineering and the importance of multidisciplinary research networks to address current issues in Scientific Machine Learning. Alvaro took the opportunity to highlight the need for Brazil to invest in high performance computing capacity.

The country’s sovereignty needs autonomy in producing ML advances, which depends on HPC support at the Universities and Research Centers. Brazil has nine machines in the Top 500 list of the most powerful computer systems in the world, but almost all at Petrobras company, and Universities need much more. ML is well-known to require HPC, when combined to scientific computer simulations it becomes essential.

The conventional notion of ML involves training an algorithm to automatically discover patterns, signals, or structures that may be hidden in huge databases and whose exact nature is unknown and therefore cannot be explicitly programmed. This field may face two major drawbacks: the need for a significant volume of (labelled) expensive to acquire data and limitations for extrapolating (making predictions beyond scenarios contained in the trained data difficult).

Considering that an algorithm’s predictive ability is a learning skill, current challenges must be addressed to improve the analytical and predictive capacity of Scientific ML algorithms, for example, to maximize its impact in applications of renewable energy. References [1-5] illustrate recent advances in Scientific Machine Learning in different areas of engineering and computer science.

References:

[*] https://www.coppe.ufrj.br/pt-br/planeta-coppe-noticias/noticias/coppe-e-sociedade-especialistas-debatem-os-reflexos-da-inteligencia

[1] Baker, Nathan, Steven L. Brunton, J. Nathan Kutz, Krithika Manohar, Aleksandr Y. Aravkin, Kristi Morgansen, Jennifer Klemisch, Nicholas Goebel, James Buttrick, Jeffrey Poskin, Agnes Blom-Schieber, Thomas Hogan, Darren McDonaldAlexander, Frank, Bremer, Timo, Hagberg, Aric, Kevrekidis, Yannis, Najm, Habib, Parashar, Manish, Patra, Abani, Sethian, James, Wild, Stefan, Willcox, Karen, and Lee, Steven. Workshop Report on Basic Research Needs for Scientific Machine Learning: Core Technologies for Artificial Intelligence. United States: N. p., 2019. Web. doi:10.2172/1478744.

[2] Brunton, Steven L., Bernd R. Noack, and Petros Koumoutsakos. “Machine learning for fluid mechanics.” Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics 52 (2020): 477-508.

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The goal of the investigation is to provide users with simplified access to computing structures through scientific solutions that represent significant developments in their fields. In the case of this project, it is intended to develop intelligent green scientific solutions for BioinfoPortal (a multiuser Brazilian infrastructure)supported by High-Performance Computing environments.

Technologically, it includes areas such as scientific workflows, data mining, machine learning, and deep learning. The outlook, in case of success, is the analysis and interpretation of Big Data allowing new paths in molecular biology, genetics, biomedicine, and health— so it becomes necessary tools capable of digesting the amount of information, efficiently, which can come.

The team performed several large-scale bioinformatics experiments that are considered to be computationally intensive. Currently, artificial intelligence is being used to generate models to analyze computational and bioinformatics metadata to understand how automatic learning can predict computational resources efficiently. The workshop was held from April 10th to 11th, and took place in the University of Sao Paulo.

RISC2 Project, which aims to explore the HPC impact in the economies of Latin America and Europe, relies on the interaction between researchers and policymakers in both regions. It also includes 16 academic partners such as the University of Buenos Aires, National Laboratory for High Performance Computing of Chile, Julich Supercomputing Centre, Barcelona Supercomputing Center (the leader of the consortium), among others.

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By:

Carneiro, B. Fagundes, C. Osthoff, G. Freire, K. Ocaña, L. Cruz, L. Gadelha, M. Coelho, M. Galheigo, and R. Terra are with the National Laboratory of Scientific Computing, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Carvalho is with the Federal Center for Technological Education Celso Suckow da Fonseca, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Douglas Cardoso is with the Polytechnic Institute of Tomar, Portugal.

Boito and L, Teylo is with the University of Bordeaux, CNRS, Bordeaux INP, INRIA, LaBRI, Talence, France.

Navaux is with the Informatics Institute, the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, and Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.

References:

Ocaña, K. A. C. S.; Galheigo, M.; Osthoff, C.; Gadelha, L. M. R.; Porto, F.; Gomes, A. T. A.; Oliveira, D.; Vasconcelos, A. T. BioinfoPortal: A scientific gateway for integrating bioinformatics applications on the Brazilian national high-performance computing network. Future Generation Computer Systems, v. 107, p. 192-214, 2020.

Mondelli, M. L.; Magalhães, T.; Loss, G.; Wilde, M.; Foster, I.; Mattoso, M. L. Q.; Katz, D. S.; Barbosa, H. J. C.; Vasconcelos, A. T. R.; Ocaña, K. A. C. S; Gadelha, L. BioWorkbench: A High-Performance Framework for Managing and Analyzing Bioinformatics Experiments. PeerJ, v. 1, p. 1, 2018.

Coelho, M.; Freire, G.; Ocaña, K.; Osthoff, C.; Galheigo, M.; Carneiro, A. R.; Boito, F.; Navaux, P.; Cardoso, D. O. Desenvolvimento de um Framework de Aprendizado de Máquina no Apoio a Gateways Científicos Verdes, Inteligentes e Eficientes: BioinfoPortal como Caso de Estudo Brasileiro In: XXIII Simpósio em Sistemas Computacionais de Alto Desempenho – WSCAD 2022 (https://wscad.ufsc.br/), 2022.

Terra, R.; Ocaña, K.; Osthoff, C.; Cruz, L.; Boito, F.; Navaux, P.; Carvalho, D. Framework para a Construção de Redes Filogenéticas em Ambiente de Computação de Alto Desempenho. In: XXIII Simpósio em Sistemas Computacionais de Alto Desempenho – WSCAD 2022 (https://wscad.ufsc.br/), 2022.

Ocaña, K.; Cruz, L.; Coelho, M.; Terra, R.; Galheigo, M.; Carneiro, A.; Carvalho, D.; Gadelha, L.; Boito, F.; Navaux, P.; Osthoff, C. ParslRNA-Seq: an efficient and scalable RNAseq analysis workflow for studies of differentiated gene expression. In: Latin America High-Performance Computing Conference (CARLA), 2022, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Proceedings of the Latin American High-Performance Computing Conference – CARLA 2022 (http://www.carla22.org/), 2022.

^[1] https://bioinfo.lncc.br/

^[2] https://git.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/csbase-dev/csgrid/-/tree/CSGRID-2.3-LNCC

^[3] https://https://sdumont.lncc.br

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In each webinar, it will be presented the state-of-the-art in methods and tools for setting-up and maintaining HPC hardware and software infrastructures. The duration of each talk will be around 30-40 minutes, followed by a 10–15-minute moderated discussion with the audience.

There are already 4 webinars scheduled:

• Developing complex workflows that include HPC, Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics | February 22

• A roadmap to quantum computing integration into HPC infrastructures | March 15

• Improving energy-efficiency of High-Performance Computing clusters | April 26

• Addressing the challenges of scientific visualization in the exascale age | May 31

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Date: March 15, 2023 | 4 p.m. (UTC)

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Date: February 22, 2023 | 4 p.m. (UTC)

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The computer named JUPITER (short for “Joint Undertaking Pioneer for Innovative and Transformative Exascale Research”) will be installed 2023/2024 on the campus of Forschungszentrum Jülich. It is intended that the system will be operated by the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC), whose supercomputers JUWELS and JURECA currently rank among the most powerful in the world. JSC has participated in the application procedure for a high-end supercomputer as a member of the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS), an association of the three German national supercomputing centres JSC in Jülich, High Performance Computing Stuttgart (HLRS), and Leibniz Computing Centre (LRZ) in Garching. The competition was organized by the European supercomputing initiative EuroHPC JU, which was formed by the European Union together with European countries and private companies. 

JUPITER is now set to become the first European supercomputer to make the leap into the exascale class. In terms of computing power, it will be more powerful that 5 million modern laptops of PCs. Just like Jülich’s current supercomputer JUWELS, JUPITER will be based on a dynamic, modular supercomputing architecture, which Forschungszentrum Jülich developed together with European and international partners in the EU’s DEEP research projects.

In a modular supercomputer, various computing modules are coupled together. This enables program parts of complex simulations to be distributed over several modules, ensuring that the various hardware properties can be optimally utilized in each case. Its modular construction also means that the system is well prepared for integrating future technologies such as quantum computing or neurotrophic modules, which emulate the neural structure of a biological brain.

Figure Modular Supercomputing Architecture: Computing and storage modules of the exascale computer in its basis configuration (blue) as well as optional modules (green) and modules for future technologies (purple) as possible extensions. 

In its basis configuration, JUPITER will have and enormously powerful booster module with highly efficient GPU-based computation accelerators. Massively parallel applications are accelerated by this booster in a similar way to a turbocharger, for example to calculate high-resolution climate models, develop new materials, simulate complex cell processes and energy systems, advanced basic research, or train next-generation, computationally intensive machine-learning algorithms.

One major challenge is the energy that is required for such large computing power. The average power is anticipated to be up to 15 megawatts. JUPITER has been designed as a “green” supercomputer and will be powered by green electricity. The envisaged warm water cooling system should help to ensure that JUPITER achieves the highest efficiency values. At the same time, the cooling technology opens up the possibility of intelligently using the waste heat  that is produced. For example, just like its predecessor system JUWELS, JUPITER will be connected to the new low-temperature network on the Forschungszentrum Jülich campus. Further potential applications for the waste heat from JUPITER are currently being investigated by Forschungszentrum Jülich.

By Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC)

The first image is JUWELS: Germany’s fastest supercomputer JUWELS at Forschungszentrum Jülich, which is funded in equal parts by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia (MKW NRW) via the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS). (Copyright: Forschungszentrum Jülich / Sascha Kreklau)

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