CFD Jobs in the Basque Country

Bravo again for the Basque Center for Applied Mathematics: this time they are looking to feel a position to develop codes for a Basque company: concretely Baltogar, 'a prestigious fan manufacturer in industrial and ventilation market'.

The requirements and application form is found here.

ps: in my opinion it is way more important to invest in people, local industry and our own codes. Secondly, is to organize the machines, data centers and optimize their cost as much as possible. Will write about this very soon.

ITP and The Meaning of SuperComputing in the Gas Turbine Industry

I wanted to share today a presentation and some slides from Roque Corral a teacher in Madrid and employee for the Basque firm ITP. ITP is well known for Engineering, Research and Development, Manufacture, Assembly and Test of aeronautical engines and gas turbines. They are one of the most important HPC users in the Basque Country and I find this presentation extremely interesting.

It is also very important to extract some learning from his last slide:

• Use of Cost-Effective Top500 class
• Many small rather than few large simulations
• Use of Parallelization in the standard Design Practice
• In-house built-in machines with commodity components
• In-house Codes
• Use of hundreds of CPUs for Research Purposes (Thousands in USA) at Universities
• Former WSs, before used for both Graphics (CADs, etc.) and Simulations, Today substituted by Clusters
• Methods’ Groups Supporting End-Designers
• The Technology is “In and Out” there but it is Difficult to Market at Large Scale !!!

Here are the slides and I have embedded an upload of the video:

Roque Corral -ITP and Supercomputing from infobasque on Vimeo.

Epsilon Euskadi data centre

This video in Basque and Spanish for a local telly in the Basque shows Epsilon Euskadi impressive installations. In the video the director Joan Villadelprat shows Epsilon Euskadi HQ and the datacenter where the supercomputer will be hosted: it costs 10€ million according to his words.

The video lasts only 10 minutes.

Euskalmet, Ejie and iDataplex

A year since we heard about the first idataplex installation for Euskalmet.

However not much has been published since. Today, I just found an article in spanish that says that the system counts with 128 computing nodes, 6 management nodes and a total number of 1,072 procs.

But that is all folks...!

DIcotomies

When having drinks with my work-fellas we always come to the same question: HPC centers or Science/Industry labs with HPC resources.

The unexistence of either does not mean the unexistance of the other.

What is more appropriate ?

We naturally lead the conversation to US specialized labs: LLNL, Oak Ridge, and other sound names. It seems normal to see HPC resources and research in there.

If we look at HPC centres and specially in the newly-iesh ones, there is always a tremendous lack of the science itself. But they are ruled by scientist and try to do science, however the machine is the excuse. So ... what ?

From my point of view both perspectives could work. And both have their own problematic. I think it is more about the willingness first of the governments, to create such centres with clear objectives, under clear scientific policies with long term ambitious goals. Second of the managers: unfortunately public sector always suffers from this problem.

My point of view, is that if you want to start servicing HPC you need to operate like one of the big private ones: operations, project management, service, availability and excel in expertise. Here I see clearly MSc in Ops Management, Comp Sci, Telco, Data Centre and MBA specifically in telecom. I dont see any science there.

The challenge, the x to solve, is ... how do we mix that with science ? and industry ? any relevant example ?

Advances in Wave Energy Converters (and its close relation to Data Centers)

We already talked about Biscay Marine Energy Project and its very close relation to Lemóniz Nuclear Power Plant. We also discussed how this source of green energy could be highly beneficial to revitalizate the plant and activate a data center to serve Basque and International industry and host computing resources for HPC. We also argued why should it be Lemoniz.

Some of these entries already attracted a bit of attention, however I want to explain today my findings regarding this very interesting source of energy and the deep impact in the idea of having a data center in Lemoniz.

The first is this document, that highlights the creation of a data centre to manage an offshore Wave Energy Converters farm that would be built next to Lemoniz. From a computational perspective, this requires a mathematical challenge. Tecnalia Energy, who seems to be already involved in this project seems to be working on these and other topics. It is unknown for me if another engineering firms are doing any development. However and as we exposed in the Iberdrola Engineering case, it seems that a computing cluster could be beneficial to simulate and predict the wave behavior, so that they can protect the equipment and improve energy. Fair enough. I bet the Euskalmet guys would also be very interesting.

However today is this other document called 'bimep(Biscay Marine Energy Platform): an open sea test facility in the Basque Country ' that also attracts my attention. The project that has been presented at the European Union, says that it will be operating by mid-2011. Great news. Licensing works are in progress and my hope is that engineering works will do their best too. At least none can deny the local authorities interest.

All this leads to my opinion, that Lemoniz can still be a successful modern data center that makes use of renewable energies. Lets hope for the best.

Epsilon Euskadi and the Data Center of the Future

More good news from Epsilon Euskadi:
In collaboration with EPSILON and Intel, Cisco made a presentation last Thursday in which they showed the common view of three leading companies in data centers’ development.

Raúl Salazar, EPSILON’s IT Director, comments that “the joint work between EPSILON and Cisco, allowed us to establish the foundations of a powerful installation capable of supporting the consolidation in DPC of our whole infrastructure and future projects related to supercomputing, which we will soon have available as a new business unit at EPSILON.”

this “super-computer” is expected to become the second unit in Spain in terms of calculus capacity.

A dream made real.... what else could I say.