OIL & GAS

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin announced it has launched an international program focused on building and strengthening global research, development and education collaborations in advanced computing. The TACC International Partners in Advanced Computing (IPAC) program will encourage and support the use of advanced computational technologies to solve the world’s most challenging science and engineering problems. "TACC has a national scope and impact and we're excited to extend our activities and collaborations to international partners,” said Dr. Jay Boisseau, director, TACC. “We look forward to working with our international colleagues to develop new problem-solving techniques and technologies with potential worldwide impact." The initial participants of IPAC are Centro Nacional de Cálculo Científico, Universidad de Los Andes (CeCalCULA) in Mérida, Venezuela, and Instituto Potosino de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica (IPICyT) in San Luis Potosí, Mexico. The program will add new members every year focusing on Latin America initially, and then will expand to Europe, Asia and beyond. IPAC members share the vision to enhance knowledge discovery overall, not just provide technologies for computational tasks. To accomplish this goal, they will build research and development collaborations in grid and distributed computing, scientific visualization and data analysis, as well as address the need for educational interchange. Dr. Luis Nuñez, director, CeCalCULA, said: “We are looking forward to research and educational collaborations, and have already benefited from the classes taught here by TACC personnel on parallel computing, grid computing and grid software development.” “Just last month, two of our technical personnel traveled from Venezuela to Austin to work with TACC's staff on testing Globus4 and to discuss requirements for the next release of GridPort,” Nuñez continued. “This opportunity for cross-functional training on an international basis is significant for these students both academically and culturally.” Each new member will adopt the IPAC charter to collaborate on academic and research opportunities, exchange academic materials and information, hold joint seminars and conferences, and provide increased access to advanced computing resources. "International collaboration is essential to assure the most efficient, effective advance of the many disciplines in the computational sciences and to serve the interests of researchers around the world,” said Barbara Fossum, IPAC program manager. “TACC is extending such collaboration to institutions not previously involved in these programs. We all expect to gain valuable insight into the possibilities for empowering researchers in global reach and scope." IPAC plans to begin a quarterly web publication in winter 2005 to share accomplishments among the participants and the international high-performance computing community. For more information about IPAC, please contact Barbara Fossum, research and development programs coordinator at TACC: bfossum@tacc.utexas.edu.