AsianScientist (Mar. 07, 2023) – In 2019, Dr Piyawut Srichaikul traveled 9,673 km from his residence metropolis of Bangkok to Barcelona, the place he joined researchers from all over the world on the Affiliation for Computing Equipment (ACM) Summer time Faculty on Excessive Efficiency Computing (HPC). Co-organized by the Barcelona Supercomputing Middle (BSC-CNS), the college featured a full week of lectures and hands-on workout routines with among the greatest names in HPC.
On the occasion, Srichaikul had an thought. “As an alternative of flying individuals to the EU,” Srichaikul requested himself, “What if we might deliver a faculty like this to ASEAN?” Srichaikul is a co-chair of the ASEAN HPC Taskforce and likewise a senior researcher on the NSTDA Supercomputer Middle (ThaiSC), positioned in Khlong Nueng, north of Bangkok.
It took just a few years and the assistance of the Jakarta-based Enhanced Regional EU-ASEAN Dialogue Instrument (E-READI), however this concept has now turn out to be actuality: the College of Kasetsart in Bangkok just lately hosted the second EU-ASEAN HPC Faculty—the primary to be held in particular person.
The primary version of the occasion, held in Bangkok in 2021, was absolutely distant given the well being protocols in place on the time. However for the 2022 EU-ASEAN Faculty, a complete of 60 college students chosen from a pool of 300 functions from all 10 ASEAN member states had been in a position to attend the occasion in particular person. The Faculty ran from December 5 to 10, 2022, and is considered one of a rising variety of packages and actions within the area encouraging younger students to be taught extra about HPC-enabled analysis.
Creating Invaluable Connections
Srichaikul defined that the EU-ASEAN HPC Faculty has two targets. The primary is to create a expertise pipeline for the HPC trade.
“We need to develop native expertise and promote capacity-building amongst ASEAN member states,” he advised Supercomputing Asia in an interview. “We would like college students to be taught and translate that studying to actual advantages.”
The second, extra long-term objective is selling regional collaboration. “You can’t count on each nation to have the identical know-how,” Srichaikul mentioned, explaining that whereas international locations like Singapore and Thailand have national-scale HPCs in place, others are nonetheless laying out roadmaps to do the identical. “ASEAN international locations have financial gaps, and so we’ve to ask: How can we make HPCs right into a regional useful resource in order that our scientists can faucet into this computing energy?”
Dr Fabrizio Gagliardi, director of the EU-ASEAN HPC Faculty, shares this view. “ASEAN is a little bit bit like Europe,” Gagliardi identified in an interview with Supercomputing Asia. “There are massive variations, say, between international locations like Germany and Romania. Their economies are utterly completely different, the way in which it’s with Singapore and Vietnam. And so, HPC faculties are supposed to be serving to those that could also be working a little bit behind.”
These two targets are why Gagliardi and his crew designed the college to not solely have periods on essentially the most highly effective HPC programs within the area—akin to Singapore’s ASPIRE 2A and Thailand’s LANTA, apart from Japan’s Fugaku and Finland’s LUMI—this system additionally included loads of alternatives for contributors to community with one another and with the college’s esteemed visitors.
For the 2022 EU-ASEAN HPC Faculty, the visitors of honor included Satoshi Matsuoka, director of the RIKEN Middle for Computational Science; Anders Jensen, government director of EuroHPC; Jack Dongarra, Turing Laureate 2021 and writer of the The LINPACK Benchmark that serves as the idea for the TOP500 record; and Supa Hannongbua, president of the Chemical Society of Thailand.
For his half, Gagliardi isn’t any stranger to fostering youthful researchers and networks. As a senior technique advisor on the BSC-CNS, he has overseen a number of HPC summer season faculties within the EU and was a part of the crew that introduced Srichaikul to Barcelona again in 2019.
Now Srichaikul’s colleague in organizing the EU-ASEAN HPC Faculty, Gagliardi shared that all of it boils right down to creating the following technology of HPC scientists. “I feel it’s a part of any scientist’s mission. We work exhausting all our lives—that are comparatively quick—and we attain a stage of information we don’t need to be wasted, and so we need to prepare the youthful technology. ” he mentioned. “We need to be sure that there are individuals behind us to proceed the work.” The identical may be mentioned for the visitor audio system and lecturers, who got here all the way in which to Bangkok in 2022 as volunteers.
By connecting college students to state-of-the-art HPC know-how, seasoned consultants and one another, the EU-ASEAN HPC Faculty hopes to develop contributors’ potential not only for their particular person analysis tasks, however for the area basically.
Dr Marieanne Leong, an atmospheric scientist who obtained the Greatest Scholar Award within the 2021 EU-ASEAN HPC Faculty, agrees. “My hope is for an open-source or shared HPC facility to be out there within the ASEAN area,” she shared in an interview with Supercomputing Asia. “These amenities are costly, and never all international locations or organizations can afford it.” With this shared HPC atmosphere, Leong hopes to pool regional experience to sort out massive points like local weather change.
“Now we have good individuals,” Srichaikul confidently mentioned. “They know what they need to do. It’s only a matter of giving them the chance [to achieve it].”
“The Time Is Now, And The Alternative Is Right here”
For Gagliardi, there is no such thing as a higher time to develop HPC expertise in ASEAN.
“It has at all times been very thrilling,” mentioned Gagliardi. “However now, there are such a lot of transformations on the stage of digital parts and the methods you set them collectively to interconnect reminiscence hierarchies. After which on the software program facet, there are new methods to program all these massive machines.”
With that in thoughts, he encourages younger individuals to hunt out completely different HPC packages. “The time is now, and the chance is right here, no matter whether or not you get into the EU-ASEAN HPC Faculty or not.”
And he’s proper: apart from the college, there are webinars, scholarships and competitions for younger scientists all for studying extra about HPC.
In 2022, for instance, the Nationwide Supercomputing Centre (NSCC) Singapore organized two competitions. The primary was the 2022 APAC HPC-AI Competitors, for which the NSCC teamed up with the HPC-AI Advisory Council and the Nationwide Computational Infrastructure (NCI) Australia. Open to groups from throughout Asia and the Pacific, the competitors offered coaching in synthetic intelligence, HPC foundations, UCX programming and Quantum Espresso, amongst others. Winners had been introduced in Dallas, Texas, in November, and can obtain their awards on the Supercomputing Asia 2023 convention in Singapore this March.
The second landmark competitors was the Inaugural HPC Innovation Problem for the Setting, which was supported by GeoWorks, SGTech and SGInnovate. Open to native enterprises and faculty college students, this system challenged its contributors to consider HPC-enabled options that may help data-centric approaches to handle the atmosphere, scale back one’s carbon footprint, create higher city environments and construct local weather resilience. A complete of 10 groups throughout the coed and open classes had been shortlisted for the answer growth section, the place they got entry to the ASPIRE 2A in addition to mentorship from material consultants.
“The environmental options developed by the profitable groups within the HPC Innovation Problem are just the start,” mentioned Professor Tan Tin Wee, chief government of NSCC. “Singapore is brimming with curiosity and expertise for HPC and curiosity in the remainder of the area is rising quickly. By means of occasions like this, we’re very joyful to empower younger individuals in diving into this new period of HPC analysis.”
In the direction of an ASEAN HPC Future
Taken collectively, these actions are offering a glimpse of a thriving ASEAN HPC atmosphere—a future that isn’t too far, and one which guarantees thrilling findings in a variety of analysis areas.
Dr Nikman Adli bin Nor Hashim, a Malaysian genomic scientist who participated within the EU-ASEAN HPC Faculty final December, is seeking to construct on his new experiences in HPC know-how for omics analysis. “It’s plain that bioinformatics and computational instruments are essential in at present’s analysis, since we’re coping with heavy computational analyses,” he advised Supercomputing Asia in an interview. He hopes to share his learnings together with his colleagues to additional enhance analysis on Southeast Asian populations.
Leong, for her half, is at the moment utilizing HPC to review atmospheric processes in Peninsular Malaysia. She was invited once more to take part within the second EU-ASEAN HPC Faculty, this time in particular person. Leong described the expertise as “past awe-inspiring,” and hopes to make use of her analysis to contribute to climate-resilient growth.
Gagliardi plans to make the EU-ASEAN HPC Faculty a everlasting annual occasion, with international locations taking turns to play host. Indonesia has already expressed curiosity in internet hosting subsequent yr’s Faculty.
On the finish of the day, Srichaikul says that efforts just like the EU-ASEAN HPC Faculty are much less about costly items of {hardware} and infrastructure. “It’s actually about who’s utilizing it and for what profit,” he mentioned. “These analysis functions are what deliver worth to ASEAN communities, at present and sooner or later.”
—
Picture: Jorgina Tan/ Asian Scientist Journal
This text was first printed within the print model of Supercomputing Asia, January 2023.
Click on here to subscribe to Asian Scientist Journal in print.
Copyright: Asian Scientist Journal.
Disclaimer: This text doesn’t essentially replicate the views of AsianScientist or its employees.