Title: HPC with and without HPC infrastructures

Speaker: Harold Castro, Ph. D., Associate professor, University of Los Andes

Time: 10:00 AM, July 1, 2013

Venue: Meeting room, Computing Center, Institute of High Energy Physics

Abstract：

High Performance Computing applications are announced as a potential beneficiary of cloud computing technology, but from the announcement to the reality there’s still a gap to be filled. There are two main difficulties to materialize these announcements on HPC: the costs of setting up and operate a private cloud and the difficulties to efficiently exploit a public one. In this talk I will present two different projects: e-clouds and unaCloud aimed at helping researcher and infrastructure providers to tackle these issues. E-clouds is a marketplace of scientific SaaS solutions which allows researchers to easily run their applications on public IaaS and it offers to developers architectural patterns to efficiently port applications to these infrastructures. On the other hand, unaCloud is an opportunistic IaaSimplementation which allows building virtual clusters to exploit the unused resources of desktop computers in labs of an University campus. Unlike volunteer computing projects, unaCloud takes advantage of the higher level of control of desktops within a lab and it recreates the exact environments researchers are used to work with, so for them there is no difference between working on unaCloud or working on a real HPC cluster.

About the speaker:

Harold Castro graduated in computing and systems engineering at Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, Colombia in 1989, he got a D.E.A (MSc) from the Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble (INPG), in Grenoble, France in 1991 and since 1995 he holds a Ph.D. in computer science from INPG also.

Since 2000 he is associate professor at the Computing and Systems Engineering Department at Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, Colombia. In 2000 he co-founded ESILOG consulting, an IT consulting company, which helps Spanish industries to improve their IT efficiency.

Currently, he is the director of the COMIT (Communications and Information Technology) research group which main research focus are distributed systems. Dr. Castro personally leads institutional and national HPC initiatives, and his interest areas are: distributed systems, grid and cloud computing, and mobile computing. He has been involved in several projects co-founded by the UE under its framework programs as well as projects with the local industry, mainly on the field of helping organizations to define their IT infrastructure.