This 2015 the National Laboratory for High Performance Computing (NLHPC) is five years old, and in its short life passed from having 9 to 17 associates across the country and installed Leftraru, the most powerful supercomputer in Chile, that reaches the 50 teraflops, and that joins the distributed computing resources between the universities that started this project.
High Performance Computing (HPC) is currently the most advanced information technology of numeric calculation to perform complex and specific investigations. this tool allows to accomplish with certainty and speed, billions of mathematical calculations, to analyse problems or phenomena in a more precise way.
Facing this scenario, chilean scientists couldn’t stay behind and needed to count with HPC technology that could allow them to keep a degree of world class competitivity, and continue making frontier research in each of the institutions.
One of the first collaborative efforts in this matter was CLGrid. This initiative started back in 2006, in response to the concern and compromise of a group of researchers from 8 universities , who dreamed about the creation of a national grid infrastructure, that’d support the development of science, through the use of resources (compute, storage, etc.) distributed across the country and connected through REUNA’s academic network.
Since its origins, CLGrid accomplished various workshops, in which experiences were shared, training was given, and the steps to follow in order to concrete these collective aspirations were analysed. It was because of this that in 2011, the NLHPC was born, initiative lead by Universidad de Chile and that gathers together Universidad Católica del Norte (UCN), Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María (UTFSM), Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (PUC), Universidad de Santiago de Chile (USACH), Universidad de Talca (UTalca) and Universidad de la Frontera (UFRO), in association with REUNA. This associative project is financed by Conicyt’s PIA, and its objective is to install a high performance computing capacity, that helps satisfy the national demand for this technology, offering high quality services and promoting it use on basic and applied investigation problems, as well as industrial applications.
The NLHPC network is distributed between Santiago, Valparaíso, Talca, Temuco and Antofagasta, and is linked through REUNA’s digital platftorm. This way, all the participating institutions count with their own cluster, but also are interconnected to a central processing node, located at the Center for Mathematical Modeling (CMM) of Universidad de Chile. It is precisely in this center where Leftraru is installed, the most powerful supercomputer in Chile, that reaches 50 teraflops, equivalent to around 25 thousand notebooks working at the same time. This capacity ranks it 2nd in the Latin American Initiative Lartop 50, and allows its experimental use, data processing and carrying of simulations, in diverse areas such as genomic sequencing, nanotechnology, astronomy, aerodynamics design, medicine and molecular simulation.
High performance science
Among the aims of the NLHPC, and as one of the premises that impulsed this initiative, is to allow national researchers have access to the NLHPC, to hence solve intense computing and data scientific problems. Because of this all the scientists and academics that require this service can request free of charge access to compute time and massive storage capacity, in the CMM’s clusters, called Levque and Leftraru.
For the Deputy Director, Ginés Guerrero, this is the main contribution to science and investigation: the use free of charge of a high performance infrastructure, without precedent in the country.
“Thanks to the computational power this machine offers, simulations that were impossible to accomplish before; reduce in a considerable way the compute time of the simulations of hundreds of scientists; compute a big quantity of parallel simulations, and carry out simulations in a rather precise way. This makes possible scientists to obtain results and take decisions on them in a much shorter span of time than before, allowing for quicker advances in their investigations.
Thanks to the use of this technology, scientists and academics alike of each institution associated to this project are developing their own lines of investigation.
For the UTFSM, to be part of the NLHPC has allowed them to establish an innovative focus of shared regime, through the virtualization technique that joins two ways of working (HPC with Grid computing and the original NLHPC system). Thanks to this system, their users can access and process their big scale data in the storage servers of the Technologic Scientific Center of Valaparaiso (CCTVal), and at the same time, use a system of the NLHPC for the creation of prototypes. And also, run tests in a local way and prepare their codes, for future executions in the remote cluster (Leftraru), explains Yuri Ivanov, researcher at CCTVal.
UFRO has specialized in particle physics, materials design, genome ensemble, signal processing in real time and meteorological simulations.“We are making meteorological forecasts that we send to more than 30 agricultors, adjusting the same model of the Dirección Meteorológica de Chile with local meteorological stations, so that we have a forecast that is better calibrated for the region. We talk about rain quantity and wind speed, which requires more processing quantity, in order to be able to deliver temperature forecasts every hour and emit freeze warnings», highlighted Andrés Ávila, director of the Center of Excellence for Scientific Computing and Modeling (CEMCC) of Universidad de La Frontera.
In the case of UChile, there’s diverse themes of investigation in which the NLHPC plays a fundamental role. Some of them are: genome sequencing, big scale optimization problems solving, as it is the case with the rota scheduling for the freight train of Ferrocarril de Antofagasta; the discovery of supernovae in real time; molecular simulations in computational chemistry ; and atmospheric processes simulations. “To count with infrastructure and equipment that allows the development of academic, scientific and technological activity, in collaborative surroundings, is fundamental for the progress the country needs. This way, the NLHPC model, with central processing capacities united to distributed distributed poles, that respond to local challenges and/or specific needs of research groups, all of them interconnected between them via high speed networks, allows researchers from different parts of the country access the resources that otherwise would be impossible. This is the integrative look that REUNA seeks to strengthen, and iniciatives such as the NLHPC are precisely under this line of development» states Paola Arellano, Executive Director of REUNA.
“Our main focus is, and will always be, to help the progress of science»
Currently, the NLHPC is facing the renovation of the project, which mandatorily takes to a moment of balances and projections. “I think that these five years have served for the NLHPC to make it to a phase of maturity, whose short term projection would be to maintain the functioning of the current infrastructure as has been doing untill now, but expanding to the private and public sectors. We want to center this expansion mainly on the support to these areas in order to incentivize the use of HPC, demonstrating what «this big stranger» can do to help your progress. We should not forget that our main focus is, and will always be, to help the progress of the science in the country», says Ginés Guerrero.
Long term, the projections of this big collaborative initiative go further than that and the biggest challenge of the NLHPC is to get to be considered as an HPC center that has nothing to envy to the supercomputing centers of international reference. For this, it is vital that the government becomes conscious that this investment is necessary and essential for the country to compete and progress, in diverse areas, where computing can play a role of great relevance. Various experts coincide in affirming that a country that doesn’t compute, doesn’t compete and Chile can´t stay behind.
Source: Red Acción, Reuna