ACADEMIA
City eyes high performance computing
Viet Nam National University in HCM City (VNU-HCM) and Intel Viet Nam signed a Memorandum of Understanding to advance High Performance Computing (HPC) in HCM City over the next three years.
This will be done through short-term training programmes, Masters programmes in computational science and HPC, projects for developing pilot urban hydrometeorology and traffic behavior modeling.
A press release from VNU-HCM and the city People's Committee said the "Viet Nam National University will be building a HPC centre with a 30Terflops Intel-based HPC system to enhance developing applications to address important issues confronting HCM City".
It said VNU-HCM would develop a curriculum and start the Computational Science/HPC Master programme for the school year 2013-14 with an annual enrolment of 15-20 students.
"Meanwhile, Intel will provide an HPC software development platform, including hard disks and software development tool suites for its standard HPC enabling activities and training for course instructors and a system administrator in 2012-13," it said.
VNU-HCM staff will also receive support to participate in training programmes of Intel or Intel's partners.
Rai Hazra, vice president of Intel Corporation's Technical Computing Group, said: " We believe HPC will improve daily lives of the Vietnamese people by finding solutions to challenges such as flooding, predicting natural disasters, and solving traffic congestion."
The HCM City People's Committee will designate and allocate budgets for computational science and HPC research programs. It will also support people of different levels to participate in short-term training courses and the Masters programme.
"At the end of the first phase (2012-15), the project's outcomes will be evaluated and a decision, made on implementing next phases, the press release said.
It said the goal for a "prospective second phase (2016-20), would be to develop large HPC applications and upgrade the HPC system to 200 TFlops.
By 2020, Viet Nam would need to build a computer system with computing speed up to 1PFlops to serve domestic scientific and computing communities, it said. — VNS