Interview: Workshop on Euro/Latin American HPC Collaboration Coming to ISC 2015

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The ISC 2015 conference will feature a day-long workshop on European/Latin American HPC Collaboration. To learn more, we caught up with workshop organizer Dr. Carlos Jaime Barrios Hernández from the Universidad Industrial de Santander.

insideHPC: Can you tells us a little bit about the history of Euro/Latin American HPC Collaboration?

Dr. Carlos Jaime Barrios Hernández

Dr. Carlos Jaime Barrios Hernández

Dr. Carlos Jaime Barrios Hernández: Since 1990, a wealth of projects has been developed in Latin America to build advanced computing platforms with the key support of different European institutions. Projects such as EELA, EELA-2, GISELA, CHAIN-REDS, RISC, OPENBIO and EUBRAZIL-CC constituted comprehensive initiatives of collaboration among national partners in France, Germany, Spain or Italy and most Latin American countries, and proved to play a key role to foster academic and industrial development.

insideHPC: What is the purpose of this workshop?

Dr. Hernández: The purpose of this workshop is to offer a space for exchanging experiences and opportunities aiming at promoting and supporting new collaborations across the different countries of Europe and Latin America in order to foster collaborations between industry, universities, research centers and mixed consortiums. In a way, the idea is to see new paths to collaborations, not only in an academical way, also in industry and gouvernement partnership.

insideHPC: Your call for collaboration proposals just ended on June 1. Can you tells us about some of the proposals you received?

Dr. Hernández: All proposals are for invitation. However, more of 60 institutions contacted us to show new initiatives and projects. Only 21 were selected to present 20-minute talks. And, as you can see at our site, we’ve put together two panels to discuss the new paths.

insideHPC: Can you tell us more about what attendees will learn about in your session?

Dr. Hernández: It’s about collaboration. Of course, there are researchers, directors and professors of representative institutions of high performance and advanced computing centers in Europe and Latin America. We’ll also have industrial attendees from technology centers and economic sectors with strong interests in latin america such as oil and gas industries (which use HPC) and members of the Europe and Latin America academic consortiums for education and research. Attendees will get to meet people from Spain, Italy, France, Luxembourg, Germany, Netherlands, UK, Portugal and Belgium, for the European side. From Latin America, people from Brazil, Mexico, Costa Rica, Colombia, Chile and Argentina will be on hand from a continental collaboration named SCALAC: (Advanced Computing Service for Latin America and Caribbean).

Notable luminaries on hand include:

  • Jesus Carretero, of the Carlos III University in Madrid, Spain and responsible of NESUS Network
  • Ulises Cortes, from Barcelona Supercomputing Center at Barcelona, Spain, manager of the Iberoamerican network in supercomputing
  • Michel Riveill of the French CNRS- I3S Laboratory in Nice Sophia Antipolis and Responsible of the Soutenable Informatics Laboratory between France and Colombia
  • Steffano Cozzini, director of the Master in HPC developed in Trieste, Italy
  • Alvaro de la Ossa, one of the managers of the Europe/latin America Collaboration, from Costa Rica, and many others.

In summary, we are very much looking forward to meeting our colleagues at ISC 2015!

Early-bird registration rates end June 10 for ISC 2015, which takes place July 12-16 in Frankfurt.

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