Given the nature of the project, RISC2 could not fail to be represented through its partners and with a strong presence in the event’s program. Carlos J. Barrios, researcher from the Universidad Industrial de Santander and RISC2 partner was responsible for opening CARLA, with his address setting the tone for the conference, emphasizing the importance of collaborative efforts and knowledge sharing in furthering the frontiers of HPC.

Fabrizio Gagliardi, the coordinator of RISC2, also took center stage with a special talk that introduced the audience to the mission and objectives of the RISC2 project. The presentation shed light on the pivotal role that RISC2 plays in advancing HPC research and development of the cooperation between the two continents in this field. Gagliardi participated in the EuroHPCLatam panel: Policy and Global Actions, which included representatives from Red Clara, CAF and the Ministry of CyT Colombia. This panel explored the policies and global actions required to propel HPC forward in Latin America, emphasizing collaboration between key stakeholders.

Another highlight of CARLA 2023 was the tribute to Mateo Valero, one of the promoters of RISC2. Valero’s dedication and contributions to the field were celebrated through an award with his name and one he was the first recepient, underscoring the lasting impact of his work on the entire HPC community.

This event was particularly important as it coincided with the end of the RISC2 project and the presentation of its results. Over the course of three years, the initiative has strengthened contacts and promoted the exchange of knowledge between researchers from Latin America and Europe through the organization of nine webinars, the support of several schools, workshops, and other training events in the field for young students and researchers. During this period, RISC2 partners also participated in several conferences and ceremonies with policymakers to raise awareness of the importance of continuing to support and prioritize this area of research in the future.

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The post CARLA 2023 first appeared on RISC2 Project.

Last month, students from the field of Computer Sciences, Engineering and others related to HPC (Physics & Material Sciences, Biology/Bioinformatics, Finance, etc), gathered for six days in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, for the SC-Camp, where they had the chance to learn more about Super Computing and Distributed Systems. The week was filled with courses with focus on practical sessions, keynotes and a collaborative project.

As such, the aim of the SC-Camp was to give undergraduate and master students state-of-the-art lectures and programming practical sessions about High Performance and Distributed Computing topics.

SC-Camp is an itinerant school, which means that every year t will take HPC knowledge to a different place. This was the first time, since the Covid-19 pandemic, the SC-Camp took place in person.

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The ENERXICO Project focused on developing advanced simulation software solutions for oil & gas, wind energy and transportation powertrain industries.  The institutions that collaborated in the project are for México: ININ (Institution responsible for México), Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados del IPN (Cinvestav), Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM IINGEN, FCUNAM), Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Azcapotzalco, Instituto Mexicano del Petróleo, Instituto Politécnico Nacional (IPN) and Pemex, and for the European Union: Centro de Supercómputo de Barcelona (Institution responsible for the EU), Technische Universitäts München, Alemania (TUM), Universidad de Grenoble Alpes, Francia (UGA), CIEMAT, España, Repsol, Iberdrola, Bull, Francia e Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, España.  

The Project contemplated four working packages (WP): 

WP1 Exascale Enabling: This was a cross-cutting work package that focused on assessing performance bottlenecks and improving the efficiency of the HPC codes proposed in vertical WP (UE Coordinator: BULL, MEX Coordinator: CINVESTAV-COMPUTACIÓN); 

WP2 Renewable energies:  This WP deployed new applications required to design, optimize and forecast the production of wind farms (UE Coordinator: IBR, MEX Coordinator: ININ); 

WP3 Oil and gas energies: This WP addressed the impact of HPC on the entire oil industry chain (UE Coordinator: REPSOL, MEX Coordinator: ININ); 

WP4 Biofuels for transport: This WP displayed advanced numerical simulations of biofuels under conditions similar to those of an engine (UE Coordinator: UPV-CMT, MEX Coordinator: UNAM); 

For WP1 the following codes were optimized for exascale computers: Alya, Bsit, DualSPHysics, ExaHyPE, Seossol, SEM46 and WRF.   

As an example, we present some of the results for the DualPHYysics code. We evaluated two architectures: The first set of hardware used were identical nodes, each equipped with 2 ”Intel Xeon Gold 6248 Processors”, clocking at 2.5 GHz with about 192 GB of system memory. Each node contained 4 Nvidia V100 Tesla GPUs with 32 GB of main memory each. The second set of hardware used were identical nodes, each equipped with 2 ”AMD Milan 7763 Processors”, clocking at 2.45 GHz with about 512 GB of system memory. Each node contained 4 Nvidia V100 Ampere GPUs with 40 GB of main memory each. The code was compiled and linked with CUDA 10.2 and OpenMPI 4. The application was executed using one GPU per MPI rank. 

In Figures 1 and 2 we show the scalability of the code for the strong and weak scaling tests that indicate that the scaling is very good. Motivated by these excellent results, we are in the process of performing in the LUMI supercomputer new SPH simulations with up to 26,834 million particles that will be run with up to 500 GPUs, which is 53.7 million particles per GPU. These simulations will be done initially for a Wave Energy Converter (WEC) Farm (see Figure 3), and later for turbulent models. 

Figure 1. Strong scaling test with a fix number of particles but increasing number of GPUs.

Figure 2. Weak scaling test with increasing number of particles and GPUs.

Figure 3. Wave Energy Converter (WEC) Farm (taken from https://corpowerocean.com/)

As part of WP3, ENERXICO developed a first version of a computer code called Black Hole (or BH code) for the numerical simulation of oil reservoirs, based on the numerical technique known as Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics or SPH. This new code is an extension of the DualSPHysics code (https://dual.sphysics.org/) and is the first SPH based code that has been developed for the numerical simulation of oil reservoirs and has important benefits versus commercial codes based on other numerical techniques.  

The BH code is a large-scale massively parallel reservoir simulator capable of performing simulations with billions of “particles” or fluid elements that represent the system under study. It contains improved multi-physics modules that automatically combine the effects of interrelated physical and chemical phenomena to accurately simulate in-situ recovery processes. This has led to the development of a graphical user interface, considered as a multiple-platform application for code execution and visualization, and for carrying out simulations with data provided by industrial partners and performing comparisons with available commercial packages.  

Furthermore, a considerable effort is presently being made to simplify the process of setting up the input for reservoir simulations from exploration data by means of a workflow fully integrated in our industrial partners’ software environment.  A crucial part of the numerical simulations is the equation of state.  We have developed an equation of state based on crude oil data (the so-called PVT) in two forms, the first as a subroutine that is integrated into the code, and the second as an interpolation subroutine of properties’ tables that are generated from the equation of state subroutine.  

An oil reservoir is composed of a porous medium with a multiphase fluid made of oil, gas, rock and other solids. The aim of the code is to simulate fluid flow in a porous medium, as well as the behaviour of the system at different pressures and temperatures.  The tool should allow the reduction of uncertainties in the predictions that are carried out. For example, it may answer questions about the benefits of injecting a solvent, which could be CO2, nitrogen, combustion gases, methane, etc. into a reservoir, and the times of eruption of the gases in the production wells. With these estimates, it can take the necessary measures to mitigate their presence, calculate the expense, the pressure to be injected, the injection volumes and most importantly, where and for how long. The same happens with more complex processes such as those where fluids, air or steam are injected, which interact with the rock, oil, water and gas present in the reservoir. The simulator should be capable of monitoring and preparing measurement plans. 

In order to be able to perform a simulation of a reservoir oil field, an initial model needs to be created.  Using geophysical forward and inverse numerical techniques, the ENERXICO project evaluated novel, high-performance simulation packages for challenging seismic exploration cases that are characterized by extreme geometric complexity. Now, we are undergoing an exploration of high-order methods based upon fully unstructured tetrahedral meshes and also tree-structured Cartesian meshes with adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) for better spatial resolution. Using this methodology, our packages (and some commercial packages) together with seismic and geophysical data of naturally fractured reservoir oil fields, are able to create the geometry (see Figure 4), and exhibit basic properties of the oil reservoir field we want to study.  A number of numerical simulations are performed and from these oil fields exploitation scenarios are generated.

Figure 4. A detail of the initial model for a SPH simulation of a porous medium.

More information about the ENERXICO Project can be found in: https://enerxico-project.eu/

By: Jaime Klapp (ININ, México) and Isidoro Gitler (Cinvestav, México)

The post Subsequent Progress And Challenges Concerning The México-UE Project ENERXICO: Supercomputing And Energy For México first appeared on RISC2 Project.

The Alliance’s aim is to foster the development of secure, resilient and human-centric digital infrastructures on the basis of a values-based framework, ensuring a democratic and transparent enabling environment and putting a strong emphasis on privacy and digital rights. It is the first intercontinental digital partnership agreed between both regions under Global Gateway investment strategy, the EU’s offer for trusted and sustainable connections with partner countries.

More information here.

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The post 14th International SuperComputing Camp 2023 first appeared on RISC2 Project.

Building on the success of previous editions, the seventh installment of the Costa Rica High Performance Computing School (CRHPCS) aims at preparing students and researchers to introduce HPC tools in their workflows. A selected team of international experts taught sessions on shared-memory programming, distributed-memory programming, accelerator programming, and high performance computing.  This edition had instructors Alessandro Marani and Nitin Shukla from CINECA, which greatly helped in bringing a vibrant environment to the sessions.

Bernd Mohr, from Jülich Supercomputing Centre, was the Keynote Speaker of this year’s edition of the event.  A well-known figure in the HPC community at large, Bernd presented the talk Parallel Performance Analysis at Scale: From Single Node to one Million HPC Cores. In an amazing voyage through different architecture setups, Bernd highlighted the importance and challenges of performance analysis.

For Esteban Meneses, Costa Rica HPC School General Chair, the School is a key element in building a stronger and more connected HPC community in the region. This year, thanks to the RISC2 project, we were able to gather participants from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Colombia. Creating these ties is fundamental for later developing more complex initiatives. We aim at preparing future scientists that will develop groundbreaking computer applications that tackle the most pressing problems of our region.

More information here. 

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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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