US-Africa High Performance Computing Workshop: TACC Ranger Lives On

University Of Texas At Austin, Austin TX

Investigators

Abstract

This workshop will enhance the potential for U.S. scientists to collaborate with African colleagues on a wide range of data-intensive projects by helping African scientists improve local supercomputing capacity. The workshop will be organized and managed by Tommy Minyard, Director of Advanced Computing Systems at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) of the University of Texas and Austin, and will build upon the 2013 donation to three African countries of almost 2000 compute nodes from the decommissioned ?Ranger? supercomputer, which was itself funded by NSF. The 2013 donation of Ranger computing components to institutions in Botswana, Tanzania, and South Africa was funded independently by the University of Texas. This workshop will help ensure that the African scientists who received this computing infrastructure have the skills and information necessary to use this resource to advance discoveries in astronomy, agriculture, climatology, earth sciences, transportation, telecommunications and many more fields of study that are of interest and value to the U.S. and Africa. TACC will organize a series of training and information exchange events to support broader understanding and use of supercomputing in Africa and to build a foundation for US-Africa collaborative research projects. In November 2014 approximately eight African researchers will visit TACC following their attendance at the SuperComputing Conference in New Orleans. The Austin visit will allow demonstration of a broad range of applications and tools that will enhance the African scientists? understanding and ability to facilitate the second phase of the workshop in South Africa. In addition visiting Austin will allow the African scientists to meet and discuss potential collaboration with several U.S. researchers using supercomputing to study topics in or relevant to southern Africa. In December 2014 the South African Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) will host a second, much larger workshop activity. The December 2014 event will follow the annual South African Supercomputing Conference hosted by CHPC and participants from this conference will be invited to attend the subsequent workshop. Six TACC staff members will travel to South Africa to conduct three-days of intensive discussions and trainings on configuring servers into single clusters and installing and using appropriate open source applications for a range of research activities. TACC staff will also discuss the emerging multi-national African high performance computing (HPC) development plan with their African colleagues. The enhancement of HPC capacity in Africa is likely to produce near term benefits to two specific NSF-supported global activities: the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) and the iPlant Collaborative. The internationally-funded SKA will be locating instruments and data processing equipment within South Africa and the CHPC will be supporting the computational requirements of this instrument, which will produce data for researchers in the United States and around the world. The NSF-funded iPlant project works with the Gates Foundation International Breeding Platform (IBP) to share computationally based molecular breeding tools for staple food crops within Africa. The TACC-provided infrastructure and training will help HPC Centers in Tanzania and South Africa to locally host the tools and data necessary to improve productivity in staple crops in Africa. The datasets produced will be shared around the globe, providing rich comparative datasets to U.S. plant science researchers, whose research is often limited to the strains of crops used for food production in the U.S. and further limited by data held privately by Agribusiness firms. The primary broader impact of this activity will be spurring interest and skills in high performance computing that will encourage students to learn to build and manage cluster computing resources and help scientists to understand how they can use HPC to power discoveries that change the world. New collaborations between researchers and their students in the U.S. and Africa are likely to develop as African capacity for data processing improves and based on the meetings that this workshop supports. In addition, improvements in HPC have the potential to improve both computer-focused education and science education in these three African countries. This project is co-funded by International Science and Engineering in the Office of the Director and Advanced Cyberinfrastructure in the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering.