|
|
|
October 21, 2011 |
 |
Latin America's HPC Growth Agent: René Luna-Garcia
 |
 |
Central Mexico has been a hub of culture and commerce for as long as humans
have gathered there. As early as A.D. 750, this region was inhabited by over
100,000 people, and was known as the “Place of the Gods.” Today,
Mexico City is the growth center of high performance computing in Mexico and
greater Latin America. At the heart of this scientific computing nexus are Centro
de Investigación en Computación at Instituto Politécnico
Nacional (CIC-IPN) and Professor René
Luna-García.
René's many years of physics research tie him to hundreds of collaborators around the globe. His work has spanned premier facilities and much of the planet, from the Tevatron collider at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in the U.S., to the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina; to conference venues in Europe; and back to his home country of Mexico, where he collaborates in the multi-year deployment of the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) particle-detector observatory at Sierra Negra.
Back at the Modeling and Simulation laboratory of the CIC-IPN, René continues his research in the computational domain, using numerical models to determine the origins of cosmic rays from the locations of particles that have been detected by the HAWC array.
René brings this wealth of field research and high-performance computing experience to his graduate students, whose areas of investigation include everything from Linux clusters and cloud computing, to network routing heuristic algorithms, to GPU programming.
In addition to the Modeling and Simulation lab faculty, CIC hosts investigators in many other computational science labs, working in artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and geo-spatial information processing; and computer engineering fields, including communications and networking, nanotechnology and embedded systems, digital signal processing, and real-time processing.
René and his peers strive to provide world-class graduate education (masters and doctoral) to their students. With René's vast and growing set of professional contacts, he has taken a leading role to organize and deliver an ongoing series of HPC workshops. Several times per year, René brings in lecturers from peer institutions, which have included San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and University of Havana among others, to address a broad range of topics, from parallel programming techniques to evolutionary algorithms to resource management and workload scheduling software. During these workshops, the students present their research to visiting lecturers in English, giving them valuable opportunities to interact on a professional level with potential future colleagues.
Rounding off his mission to grow HPC in Mexico, René also is a founding member of the organizing committee for the annual ISUM - Congreso de Supercomputo conference, which seeks to address the diverse HPC technology space to Mexico and the Americas.
René's competence, energy and enthusiasm, combined with his warm personality and his emphasis on building relationships, make him an invaluable leader to his students, and assures the continuing growth of the HPC community in Mexico and across Latin America.
To contribute to a future HPC workshop or reach potential collaborators at CIC-IPN, contact René at lunar@cic.ipn.mx. For more information on CIC, visit http://www.cic.ipn.mx/. And for information on ISUM, visit http://www.isum.mx/.
– Lyn Gerner
|
Visit |
|
Sponsor
|
Scientific Computing Highlights
|
HPC Webcast Series GPU Computing: Designing flexible systems for rapid evolution Power and Cooling: Compute More, Consume Less |
HPC Source Visualization: Rendering High-performace and High-quality Graphics Power & Cooling: Achieving the Next Level Storage:
Taming the Data Torrent |
