This 2015 the National Laboratory for High Performance Computing (NLHPC) completed five years, and in its short life, passed from nine to 17 associates distributed all along the country and installed Leftraru, the most powerful supercomputer in Chile, that reaches up to 50 teraflops, and joins the compute resources distributed between the universities that started this project.
High Performance Computing or (HPC) is currently the most advanced numeric calculation information technology, available to carry out complex and specific research. This tool allows researchers to perform, with certainty and speed, billions of mathematical calculations, for analysing problems or phenomena in a precise way.
On face of this global problem, chilean scientists couldn’t stay in disadvantage and needed to count with HPC technology that would allow them to keep a degree of world class competitivity, and continue making vanguarde research in each of the institutions.
One of the first collaboration efforts to this matter was CLGrid. This initiative emerged in 2006, in response to the concern and compromise of a group of researchers of eight universities, that were dreaming of the creation of a national grid infrastructure, that would support the science development, through the use of resources (compute, storage, scientific instrumentation, etc) distributed all along the country and connected through the REUNA academic net.
Since its origins, CLGrid produced various workshops, in which experiences were shared, training on the use of technology in Chile were given and steps to follow the concretion of these collective aspirations were analysed. It was in 2011, that the NLHPC emerged, initiative lead by Universidad de Chile, that gathers 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) y Universidad de la Frontera (UFRO), in association with REUNA.
Source: Reuna.cl