University of the Andes and NPACI collaborate to start supercomputing centre

The conference, titled "The First Latin-American School on Parallelism and High Performance Computing", provided a series of workshops on the integration of computational science and high-performance computing techniques into many areas of science, including engineering, chemistry, biology, mathematics, physics, civil engineering and geology.

CeCalCULA, also intended to use the school as a springboard to reach communities not familiar to the services that a supercomputing center has to offer. According to the university, a broad focus for a supercomputing center is to provide access to information in libraries or databases. Also, a well-developed center can offer remote access and tools, Goal is that from any part in Venezuela, a professor or researcher can use not only the tools offered at CeCalCULA, but also those of other universities.

The director of CeCalCULA spent a month in San Diego visiting SDSC to research the background of NPACI and similar organizations that could act as a model for the center in Venezuela. Future exchanges are planned that would act as a catalyst in helping CeCalCULA realizing to creae a partnership with other universities throughout the country. Additionally, the University is planning to develop collaborations with universities, businesses and organizations, at home and abroad, such as NPACI and NCSA.

The conference, which took place in the College of Sciences at the University of the Andes, exposed graduate students from Venezuelan universities to new advances in computational science that may not have been easily available to them at their own campuses. Lecturers from Venezuela presented papers on Practical Elements of MPI, Structure and Molecular Dynamics in Proteins, and Utilization of Numeric Methods in Analysis and Manufacturing of Biomedical Apparatuses.