Why should your HPC project be in the Basque Country ?

The Following document will provide some insights for those willing to relocate their High Performance Computing activities to the Basque Country. As you will find on the gubernamental web page, your project can benefit from key strategic areas: Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Electronics, and Alternative Energies expert know-how.

Investing in the Basque Country

Why should your Simulation or High Performance Computing project be in the Basque Country?

The following document -distributed by ESS Bilbao- is a bit old, but you may get the picture.

Quality of Life in the Basque Country

Recognition of hemi-methylated DNA by UHRF1

This excellent presentation was given by Ronen Zangi, Ikerbasque Research Professor from the University of the Basque Country, at a national scientific computing conference.

ps: here you can read en interview when he moved to live in San Sebastian-Donostia, to start this work.

Recognition of hemi-methylated DNA by UHRF1 (Ronen Zangi, Euskal Herriko Unibersitatea)

Iberdrola's Wind Simulations in seek of expert HPC engineers and consultants

That is what today, the Spanish supercomputing center's associate director said to a national radio program. He claims that his center -located in Barcelona- has an advanced engineering technology program ongoing to optimize Iberdrola's new wind farms across the Spanish geography. It is understood that such decisions need simulation and supercomputing capabilities, as it was described before in this blog. Despite Iberdrola is a major HPC industrial user, none of its activities seem to have any relevance inside the Basque Country.

The interview can be played here, in Spanish though.

On the other hand, Iberdrola's Chairman previously said that "significant volume of investment" was planned in the Basque " which represents a golden opportunity for Basque suppliers – highly specialized in the electricity sector –".

Update 19th October 2010: Iberdrola confirms. However this seems an strategy to win bid for 489 megawatts (MW) of wind power capacity in the are where the CASE centre is located.

Financial Times outlook cover Basque companies that use HPC

I am happy to mention here the positive outlook covered by Financial Times' Mark Mulligan.

Some good things:

"The green valleys and centuries­ old villages of the Basque Country seem an incongruous setting for the workshops of Spain’s industrial heartland. "

"the Basque Country more crisis­ resistant than the rest of Spain"

The article mention basque companies that we already covered -CIE, Iberdrola, AIC-, need the use of scientific computing, simulation, prediction and management to run successful businesses.

The Basque Mathematics Annual Report

The Basque Center for Applied Mathematics has recently published their annual report. With only 2 years, significant achievements, and things that sound really well:

-"BCAM has been granted an ERC Advanced Grant 2009 edition"

-"Collaboration with local partners and industry is also increasingly bringing new scientific challenges, human resurces and funding to BCAM "

-"Highly valuable people from different countries, committed to teamwork, continuous learning and the development of top-level mathematical knowledge and skills are continuously drawn to BCAM for training and research "

-"The aim of the team Partial Differential Equations, Numerics and Control is to contribute to the understanding - through modeling, mathematical analysis, and numerical simulation - of a wide range of phenomena such as the vibrations of complex mechanical structures, phase transitions in solids, shape design in aeronautics, and the dynamics of strongly nonlinear surface and internal waves in fluids "

"the development and analysis of mathematical models to predict and control the QoS (Quality of Service) of information and communication systems, including wired and wireless networks and large-scale distributed systems "

"Our objective is to study relevant physical and biological processes using mathematical modeling, analysis and computer simulation "

"agreements with the Chinese Academy os Sciences in Beijing, the University of Kyushu in Japan, the Tata Insititute in India"

"BCAM needs powerful computational resources to perform complex calculations and to generate simulations and visualizations "

"We have also acces to the cluster provided by i2basque, which features 232 processing cores "

The following video of the facilities features in the first 58 seconds an introduction to the center and an engineering forum celebrated in their building -text translated by google here-:

i2Basque manages Euskalmet's iDataPlex

Great news: i2basque advertises the availability of the -possibly- already announced Euskalmet's iDataplex 1064 cores machine. This is indeed great news: i2basque from my point of view, can provide the best academic and industrial connectivity and therefore the best integration in all terms. If the machine it is hosted at the EJIE data center, then we can clearly say that it is probably one of the most uptime-d scientific computing clusters around.

Now we are only missing a bit more of coordination in the next purchases, so we get better hardware and cheaper. Possibly if this was more orchestrated, we could also start some sort of research in this area, get hardware previews, coordinate software development and support, partnership. We got all the elements, do not get me wrong, but they do not seem so visible.

Whoever takes this responsibility for our community has a great task ahead.
i2basque seems the candidate, lets see how this evolves.