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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A country that does not have the computational capacity to solve its own problems will have no alternative but to try to acquire solutions provided by others. One of the most important aspects of sovereignty in the 21st century is the ability to produce mathematical models and to have the capacity to solve them. Today, the availability of computing power commensurate with one’s wealth exponentially increases a country’s capacity to produce knowledge. in the developed world, it is estimated that for every dollar invested in supercomputing, the return to society is of the order of US$ 44(1) and to the academic world US$ 30(2). For these reasons, HPC occupies an important place on the political and diplomatic agendas of developed countries. 

In Latin America, investment in HPC is very low compared to what’s the US, Asia and Europe are doing. In order to quantify this difference, we present the tables below, which show the accumulated computing capacity in the ranking of the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world – the TOP500(3) – (Table 1), and the local reality (Table 2). Other data are also included, such as the population (in millions), the number of researchers per 1,000 inhabitants (Res/1000), the computing capacity per researcher (Gflops/Res) and the computing capacity per US$ million of GPD. In Table 1, we have grouped the countries by geographical area. America appears as the area with the highest computing capacity, essentially due to the USA, which has almost 45% of the world’s computing capacity in the TOP500. It if followed by Asia and then Europe. Tis TOP500 list includes mainly academic research centres, but also industry ones, typically those used in applied research (many private ones do not wish to publish such information for obvious reasons). For example, in Brazil – which shows good computing capacity with 88,175 TFlops – the vast majority is in the hands of the oil industry and only about 3,000 TFlops are used for basic research. Countries listed in the TOP500 invest in HPC from a few TFlops per million GDP (Belgium 5, Spain 7, Bulgaria 8), through countries investing in the order of hundreds (Italy 176, Japan 151, USA 138), to even thousands, as is the case in Finland with 1,478. For those countries where we were able to find data on the number of researchers, these range from a few Gflops per researcher (Belgium 19, Spain 24, Hungary 52) to close to 1,000 GFlops, i.e. 1 TFlop (USA 970, Italy 966), with Finland surpassing this barrier with 4,647. Note that, unlike what happens locally, countries with a certain degree of development invest every 3-4 years in supercomputing, so the data we are showing will soon be updated and there will be variations in the list. For example, this year a new supercomputer will come into operation in Spain(4), which, with an investment of some 150 million euros, will give Spain one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe – and the world.

Table 1. HPC availability per researcher and relative to GDP in the TOP500 countries (includes HPC in industry).

The local reality is far from this data. Table 2 shows data from Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico. In Chile, the availability of computing power is 2-3 times less per researcher than in countries with less computing power in the OECD and up to 100 times less than a researcher in the US. In Chile, our investment measured in TFlops per million US$ of GDP is 166 times less than in the US; with respect to European countries that invest less in HPC it is 9 times less, and with respect to the European average (including Finland) it is 80 times less, i.e. the difference is considerable. It is clear that we need to close this gap. An investment go about 5 million dollars in HPC infrastructure in the next 5 years would close this gap by a factor of almost 20 times our computational capacity. However, returning to the example of Spain, the supercomputer it will have this year will offer 23 times more computing power than at present and, therefore, we will only maintain our relative distance. If we do not invest, the dap will increase by at least 23 times and will end up being huge. Therefore, we do not only need a one-time investment, but we need to ensure a regular investment. Some neighbouring countries are already investing significantly in supercomputing. This is the case in Argentina, where they are investing 7 million dollars (2 million for the datacenter and 5 million to buy a new supercomputer), which will increase their current capacities by almost 40 times(5).

Table 2. HPC availability per researcher and relative to GDP in the region (*only HPC capacity in academia is considered in this table).

For the above reasons, we are working to convince the Chilean authorities that we must have greater funding and, more crucially, permanent state funding in HPC. In relation to this, on July 6 we signed a collaboration agreement between 44 institutions with the support of the Ministry of Science to work on the creation of the National Supercomputing Laboratory(6). The agreement recognised that supercomputers are a critical infrastructure for Chile’s development, that it is necessary to centralise the requirements/resources at the national level, obtain permanent funding from the State and create a new institutional framework to provide governance. In an unprecedented inter-institutional collaboration in Chile, the competition for HPC resources at the national level is eliminated ad the possibility of direct funding from the State is opened up without generating controversy.

Undoubtedly, supercomputing is a fundamental pillar for the development of any country, where increasing investment provides a strategic advantage, and in Latin America we should not be left behind.

By NLHPC

References

(1) Hyperion Research HPC Investments Bring High Returns

(2) EESI-2 Special Study To Measure And Model How Investments In HPC Can Create Financial ROI And Scientific Innovation In Europe 

(3) https://top500.org/ 

(4) https://www.lavanguardia.com/ciencia/20230129/8713515/llega-superordenador-marenostrum-5-bsc-barcelona.html

(5) https://www.hpcwire.com/2022/12/15/argentina-announces-new-supercomputer-for-national-science/

(6) https://uchile.cl/noticias/187955/44-instituciones-crearan-el-laboratorio-nacional-de-supercomputacion

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The NLHPC staff  set their  fundamental pillar to focus  efforts on the scientific community and show HPC as an essential tool for country development by getting users from diverging scientific areas, industry and public sector. This entails breaking access barriers to this kind of technology. NLHPC faces this challenge by making training for the basic use of HPC  and scientific software optimization;  which is key in order to make a good use of resources.

The training was carried out within a framework of computational thinking, being the process by which an individual, through his professional experience and acquired knowledge, manages to face problems of different kinds. This could be evidenced in our active participation in the resolution of the proposed activities, which enhanced our abstraction and engineering thinking. We will certainly take this vision of education and collaborative work to our professional environment, in the different roles we play as HPC administrators, teachers and students.

The proper use of computing services involves efforts to perform monitoring, control and infrastructure management tasks. With the help of the tools reviewed during our visit, we will be able to provide our users with the highest standards of quality, security and accessibility.

The joint effort of the RISC2 and EU-CELAC ResInfra projects made it possible for engineers from Colombia, Mexico and Peru to participate in this HPC management course, learn about Chilean culture, gain knowledge and valuable contacts for our profession.

After living this great experience, we hope that in the near future other supercomputing centers replicate this type of initiatives in other parts of the world, thus increasing the communication bridges between HPC administrators from different places, sharing knowledge and experiences.

We are left with the milestone of being part of the First School of HPC Administrators of Latin America and the Caribbean, with experiences that made us grow in professional, academic, and human aspects. As well as with alliances among colleagues and now friends, a network of support as brothers of the same region.

We conclude by thanking Rafael Mayo of CIEMAT for the initiative; Ginés Guerrero, Pedro Schürmann, Eugenio Guerra, Pablo Flores, Angelo Guajardo, Esteban Osorio, José Morales for the knowledge and experiences shared; RISC2 and EU-CELAC ResInfra for providing us with this learning opportunity, supporting the scholarship grant.

By:

Miguel Angel Barrera Arbelaez, Universidad de los Andes, Colombia

Carlos Enrique Mosquera Trujillo, Centro de bioinformática y biología computacional de Colombia BIOS, Colombia

César Alexander Bernal Díaz, Universidad Industrial de Santander, Colombia.

Eduardo Romero Arzate, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, México.

Ronald Darwin Apaza Veliz, Universidad Nacional de San Agustín, Perú.

Joel Gonzalez Lara, Centro de Análisis de Datos y Supercómputo, México

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This school aimed to train HPC sysadmins with the latest technologies in supercomputing in a two-week training program, and discussed different topics, such as compilations, visualization and monitoring tools, networking, security tools, and installation, configuration and use of SLURM and EasyBuild, among many others.

According to Ginés Guerrero, the Executive Director of the NLHPC and one of the organizers of this training, “the NLHPC team wanted to pass on the knowledge gained for more than a decade to other administrators, so they can benefit from our experience. This has involved a great effort by a team of 7 engineers, putting aside all their tasks for several weeks to prepare an intensive 64-hour school from scratch. In addition, this process has been tailor-made, since the students indicated their own interests through a form.”

In total, the event had 8 participants from various countries: 2 from Mexico, 3 from Colombia, 2 from Chile, and 1 from Peru, leveraging the international networking opportunities and promoting closer relations between the administrators of various supercomputing centers in Latin America, the main goal of the RISC2 project. A team of 7 engineers (Guinés Guerrero, Pedro Schürmann, Eugenio Guerra, Pablo Flores, Ángelo Guajardo, Esteban Osorio, and José Morales) from NLHPC was responsible for delivering all the 35 lectures.

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The BCS-CNS hosted the ACM Summer School 2022. From 29 August to 2 September 2022, students, researchers, and professors from all over the world gathered to discuss High-Performance Computing (HPC), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning.

The RISC2 project supported the participation of Latin American students. We had the opportunity to travel from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Costa Rica to connect with leading researchers in HPC at the ACM Summer School and boost our professional careers. For some of us, it was our first time in Europe. For others, it was the first time we had the chance to visit a research centre that hosts a TOP500 supercomputer such as Mare Nostrum. We shared our latent curiosity to learn, meet, and relate to people from all over the world.

We were welcomed to the ACM School by a legend in the world of HPC, Professor Mateo Valero, director of the BSC. World-class lecturers and researchers introduced us to topics that we had only read about in scientific articles, like specialized processors for machine learning, neuromorphic engineering, technical software development for new architectures, and vector accelerators. We could delve into the state-of-the-art of many lines of study, opening our minds in countless ways. We faced new challenges and found new perspectives that would allow us to advance our research projects and complete our graduate degrees.

Throughout the week, we met colleagues from all over the world with different lines of research, projects, and fields of study. This opportunity allowed us to create new relationships, nurtured us at a cultural level, and built new ties of friendship and possible professional contributions in the future, connecting Europe with Latin America. Likewise, we strengthened relations between Latin Americans, usually separated despite being neighbours. Conversations that initially arose with academic topics ended with more trivial issues, all accompanied by a cup of coffee or even a mate brought directly from Argentina. These conversations go hand in hand with great minds and unique people.

Professors like Valerie Taylor from the Argonne National Laboratory, Charlotte Frenkel from the Delft University of Technology, Luca Benini from the Università di Bologna and ETHZ, and Jordi Torres from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, among many others, allowed us to be part of a world that, in many cases, is hard to reach for many students in Latin America. Thanks to the RISC2 project, we had the opportunity to be part of this process, learn and bring back to our countries the knowledge about state of the art in HPC architectural trends and a new vision of the world of computing.

At the end of an intense week of study and conversations, of new knowledge and new friends, we returned to our countries of origin. Together, we have brought a new vision of the world of computing, new contacts, and many new perspectives that we can apply in our studies and share with our colleagues in the research groups and, perhaps, start new foci of study.

Finally, we hope to return and meet again, make new friends, share the knowledge acquired and our experiences, and further deepen the ties within Latin America and between Europe and Latin America. We hope that other fellow Latin Americans will also benefit from similar opportunities and that they can live these kinds of experiences. The RISC2 project gave us a unique opportunity, so we want to thank them and all of those who made it possible.

By:

• Claudio Aracena, University of Chile
• Christian Asch, CeNAT, Costa Rica
• Luis Alejandro Torres Niño, UIS, Colombia
• Matías Mazzanti, UBA, Argentina
• Matheus Borges Seidel, UFRJ, Brazil

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