Expanding Horizons: Advancing HPC Education in Colombia through CyberColombia's Summer Schools

Abstract

High-performance computing (HPC) is an important tool for research, development, and the industry.Moreover, with the recent expansion of machine learning applications, the need for HPC is increasing even further.However, in developing countries with limited access to the HPC ecosystem, the lack of infrastructure, expertise, and access to knowledge represents a major obstacle to the expansion of HPC.Under these constraints, the adoption of HPC by communities presents several challenges.The HPC Summer Schools are an initiative of CyberColombia that has taken place over the past 5 years.It aims to develop the critical skills, strategic planning, and networking required to make available, disseminate, and maintain the knowledge of high-performance computing and its applications in Colombia.Here we report the results of this series of Summer Schools.The events have proven to be successful, with over 200 participants from more than 20 institutions.Participants span different levels of expertise, including undergraduate and graduate students as well as professionals.We also describe successful use cases for HPC cloud solutions, namely Chameleon Cloud. INTRODUCTIONSupercomputers are of paramount importance in solving critical challenges in many fields.Some of these are atmospheric simulation, genome sequencing, and cybersecurity, to name a few [15].In Colombia, this area is developing at a slower pace in comparison to leading countries such as the USA, Japan, and European countries.Colombia only spent 0.29% of its Gross domestic product (GDP) on Research and Development according to the UNESCO statistics [23].This level of investment is 0.92% behind South American countries such as Brazil, which is one of the leading Latin American countries in supercomputing technology.Differences in investment levels on the development of supercomputers [10] and adoption of HPC are some of the factors that heavily influence this gap.