Latin America Steps Up to the Parallel Universe Computing Challenge

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(Left to Right) Pedro Velho, Carlos Barrios, Robinson Rivas, Gilberto Díaz

(Left to Right) Pedro Velho, Carlos Barrios, Robinson Rivas, Gilberto Díaz

Over at The Data Stack, Intel’s HPC Evangelist Mike Bernhardt writes that a team from Latin America is stepping up to compete in the Intel Parallel Universe Computing Challenge (PUCC) at SC14. Calling themselves SC3, the team will represent supercomputing interests in Brazil, Columbia, Costa Rica, Mexico and Venezuela.

Mike Bernhardt: How will your team prepare for the Intel PUCC?

Team SC3: All of us work in HPC and participate in scientific projects where we have the opportunity to develop our skills.

boothMike Bernhardt: What are the most prevalent high performance computing applications in which your team members are involved?

Team SC3: We are developers, therefore, we are most familiar with programming languages than specific applications (MPI, CUDA, OpenMP).

Mike Bernhardt: SC14 is using the theme “HPC Matters” for the conference. Can you explain why “HPC Matters” to you?

Team SC3: HPC is a fundamental tool to face some challenging problems and solving them will represent a significant advance for humanity, for example, new drug development for disease treatment, high tech components for cars, planes, etc., weather simulations to understand how we are affecting the climate of the world, etc.

Mike Bernhardt: What is the significance of your team name “SC3”?

Jesus Verduzco

Jesus Verduzco

Team SC3: Super Computing and Scientific Computing in Spanish is Super Computación y Calculo Cientifico, which is the name of the lab at the Universidad Industrial de Santander.

Mike Bernhardt: Who are your team members?

Team SC3: We have six people in addition to myself so far:

  • Robinson Rivas, Professor at Universidad Central de Venezuela (UCV) and director of the supercomputer center of UCV in Caracas
  • Carlos Barrios, Professor at Universidad Industrial de Santander (UIS) and director of the supercomputer center of UIS
  • Pedro Velho, Professor at Universidad Federal de Rio Grande del Sur in Porto Alegre, Brazil
  • Alvaro de la Ossa, Professor at Universidad de Costa Rica in San Jose, Costa Rica
  • Jesus Verduzco, Professor at Instituto Politécnico de Colima in Colima, Mexico
  • Monica Hernandez, System Engineer and student in Master program at UIS

Learn more about the PUCC at SC14.

Registration is now open for SC14, which takes place Nov. 16-21 in New Orleans. At insideHPC, we are proud to be a Media Partner for the conference, so check out our full coverage to date.

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