The richness of a country is measured in… exaflops?

Supercomputing is at the day’s order. Each time are more the governments that invest in a new form of investigation and data processing. And is just like today’s scientists say “who doesn’t compute, doesn’t compete». This technology has been taking steps further progressively, going from the megaflop to the gigaflop, to later the teraflop, and from there to the petaflop. The next stop will be the exaflop and, the last, until now, the zettaflop.

And why not, China and United States have been heading this race in which has turned to the supercomputing.  According to the Top500 ranking published in june, where the most powerful supercomputers in the world are gathered, China leads the ranking with its supercomputer Tianhe-2, designed by the National University for the Chinese Defense Technology. The country, that has been captain of this list six times since 2010, counts with the most calculation power worldwide, reaching the 33,86 petaflops. While, United States is placed second with its supercomputer Titan of the Oak Ridge Laboratory in Tennesse, with 17.59 petaflops.

The world power, tired of being a runner up , has created the National Strategic Computing Initiative, signed by president, Barack Obama, with the Department of Defence, the Department of Energy and the National Foundation for Science.  The aim is to develop the first supercomputer of the exaflop era, as extension of the petaflop, able to process a trillion of operations per second, what would correspond to a one followed by 18 zeros :1.000.000.000.000.000.000. With this machine . United States pretends to debunk from the first place the asian country.

In the rest of the world, the picture is different. For instance, in Latin America, supercomputing advances little by little «but with steady pace», and just like Ginés Guerrero, deputy director of the National Laboratory for High Performance Computing project (NLHPC) of Universidad de Chile comments. That entity is an example that each time there’s more awareness of the «power supercomputing has for the development of a country».  To the extent that, the National Laboratory for High Performance Computing inaugurated in may the supercomputer Leftraru, which in mapudungun language means «fast falcon»

But this is not the only educational institution releasing processing in the region.  México is also celebrating with the implementation of National Laboratory of Supercompute in the Benemerit Universidad de Puebla, that has become the first supercomputer of the Mexican southeast and third in the country. The university is upgrading the machine with the intention of entering the next Top500 ranking wit it.

As we commented before, there’s many universities betting for supercomputing laboratories. With 70.000 undergraduate students and 5.000 postgraduate students, the BUAP has opened a new supercomputer, thanks to the 5 million dollar investment, from which the 40% of the cost of the machines of the supercomputing equipment has been financed by the National Council of Science and Technology (Conacyt).

The project that started in october 2013 depends of the General Direction of Compute and Technology of the Information, a division created on march 26th this year for embracing this type of initiatives.

In operation since february, this laboratory counts already with at least 30 projects in different areas, specially in chemistry, biophysics, and materials. Nonetheless, although its main function is research,“the intention is to expand into the automobile industry, the finance sectors and the government», explains Humberto Salazar, director of the laboratory. For that, the BUAP in the  process of certificating with the level 3 of ICREA the data center where the supercomputer is located.

Also, with the purpose of entering the ranking Top500, the BUAP is expanding in a 30% its National Laboratory of Supercomputing that will go from having 204 nodes to having 268, surpassing the 6.000 processing nodes. The interconnection will be of 56 Gbps and the storage capacity will increase from 1PB to 205TB. The number of special nodes for complex calculations and of graphic coprocessors will be doubled.

With the sames expectations emerges the National Laboratory of High Performance Computing (NLHPC) of Universidad de Chile. “Our objective is not only to offer to the entire chilean scientific community free of charge access to supercomputing capacities, but also to reach to the industry and the public sectors», says Ginés Guerrero.

To access the supercomputer, the researchers must describe their projects and, once this is made, they are assigned 120 cores and 80 GB storage space. “The idea of the government is to have impact in all the research groups across the country to make it more competitive», explains Eduardo Vera, director of the NLHPC.

Leftraru offers 44 teraflops, 2.640 núcleos de procesamiento, una interconexión de 56 Gbps, y 12 procesadores Intel Xeon 5.

University of Chile centralized in Santiago is the oldest educational entity of the country, with 30.000 students of diverse areas and a wide spectrum of investigation and development, although it also counts with artistic extensions such as the museum of experimental art or a ballet.

The project started in january 2011, received an investment in equipment of 3 million dollars, although as Ginés Guerrero points out, the project’s gross was a million dollars, financed by the Associative Investigation Program (PIA) of the National Commission of Scientific and Technological Investigation (Conicyt).

Source: Datacenterdynamics.es