Birds of a Feather Archive

ASEAN HPC

Authors: Kheng Tiong Tay (A*STAR Computational Resource Centre, Singapore), Piyawut Srichaikul (NSTDA Supercomputer Center (ThaiSC), Thailand)

Abstract: With the rise of ASEAN significance in the global landscape, so has its HPC. There are multiple world-class supercomputers now being planned and deployed and rising sets of users conducting cutting edge sciences. ASEAN has officially sanctioned its “HPC Task Force” among its coalition of major stakeholders to formulate a collective HPC infrastructure, federate them with advanced tools, collaborate with other regions e.g., Japan with Fugaku as well as with a joint HPC school with Europe and Japan. The BoF will present the status quo of ASEAN HPC and discuss further outreach of ASEAN HPC to the global HPC community.

Long Description: With the rise of ASEAN as a significant geographical region in the global landscape, so has its HPC, now that there are globally competitive universities and research centers as well as its industry. At the same time ASEAN faces various difficult societal problems, some being common to other regions of the globe, and some being more serious to the South East Asian region, such as potential food and energy shortages given the rapid growth of the population and urbanization. Here, HPC is regarded as one of the key research infrastructures to resolve such problems, and rapid progress is recently being made. Within the region, there are multiple world-class supercomputers now being planned & deployed e.g., in Thailand (ThaiSC), Singapore (Aspire1/2), as well as that being planned in Indonesia. The rising sets of users conducting cutting edge sciences for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the region is rapidly increasing to coincide with the growth of the infrastructure.

Here, rather than each country pursuing its own HPC goals in seclusion, but rather, much like other regions such as EU with PRACE and EuroHPC, Japan with HPCI, and the US with NSF XSEDE that have successfully formulated a federation of HPC centers to pursue the goals in a collective manner, ASEAN has officially launched its “HPC Task Force”, or ASEAN HPC TF for short, among its coalition of major stakeholders in HPC. The purpose is to formulate a collective HPC infrastructure by sharing experiences and know-how of running a large HPC center; federate the HPC resources with advanced tools e.g., the homegrown SC@FT (SuperComputing at your FingerTips) by A*STAR Computational Resource Centre (A*CRC) in Singapore as well as other HPC federation tools such as the Japanese Gfarm distributed filesystem for data sharing; conduct collaborations with other regions such as with Riken R-CCS in Japan on experimental call for allocation on Fugaku, to which 11 teams got accepted, as well as a highly successful ASEAN-EU-Japan joint HPC school that was held in 2021 and will be conducted again in December 2022.

Our BoF is being proposed to further expand the community of collaboration between ASEAN HPC and the global HPC community, by presenting the overall ASEAN HPC activities in more detail, and conducting discussions for effective outreach. It is being proposed as a joint effort between ASEAN HPC and our collaborators in the EU and Japan. The outcome will be a broader recognition of ASEAN HPC as a tangible regional effort, introduce some of the cutting-edge work in HPC being done for individual collaboration opportunities, as well as ASEAN HPC as a whole striving to further establish inter-regional collaborations with other major global HPC organizations.

URL: https://astnet.asean.org/bof-application/


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