Quarterly News report  9 - june 2012

File: HIGH-PERFORMANCE COMPUTING

Hydrocarbons, biotechnology, meteorology and disaster management, renewable energy and health are among the priority areas of research and industrial innovation development strategy In Algeria.

In these areas, various methods use very complex numerical models based on Physics laws. For example, modelization and simulation of tanks in the oil industry, climate modelization for weather forecasting and modelization of molecules in the pharmaceutical industry and biotechnology. Moreover, in order to refine the results and improve the quality of the models used, the transition to high precision becomes indispensable.

However, the implementation of these techniques with the required accuracy requires more computing power, making their execution impossible on a simple single-processor machine. Thus, an application is considered intensive if it requires the mobilization of a large computing power to run in a reasonable time compared to the human scale of time. This is known as supercomputing or High Performance Computing (HPC).

High Performance Computing is a field that brings together hardware and software tools necessary for running applications and complex techniques (simulations, numerical computing, modelization). Developments in this field evolve in parallel with the technological progress made in the field of distributed systems and parallel architectures. Supercomputers, clusters, computing grids and lately graphics processing units (GPUs) are supercomputing infrastructure undergoing constant changes to push the boundaries in terms of computing power. Currently the computing power achieved by some parallel infrastructures is of the order of Petaflops (1015 floating operations per second).

Today, the whole dynamics of development of a country must be followed by a significant advance in computing power, making supercomputing essential to promote such development. Thus, the development and control of this area are fundamental and strategic as it strengthens the sovereignty of a state and its technological and economic independence.

Dr. Malika Silhadi-Mehdi

Dr. Ahcène Bendjoudi

Senior Researchers

Division of Theories and Engineering of Computer Systems - DTISI