Communications of the ACM
The Latin American Supercomputing Ecosystem for Science
Credit: LNCC.br
Large, expensive, computing-intensive research initiatives have historically promoted high-performance computing (HPC) in the wealthiest countries, most notably in the U.S., Europe, Japan, and China. The exponential impact of the Internet and of artificial intelligence (AI) has pushed HPC to a new level, affecting economies and societies worldwide. In Latin America, this was no different. Nevertheless, the use of HPC in science affected the countries in the region in a heterogeneous way. Since the first edition in 1993 of the TOP500 list of most powerful supercomputing systems in the world, only Mexico and Brazil (with 18 appearances each) made the list with research-oriented supercomputers. As of June 2020, Brazil was the only representative of Latin America on the list.
HPC represents a strategic resource for Latin American researchers to respond to the economical and societal challenges in the region and to cross-fertilize with researchers in the rest of the world. Nevertheless, the Latin American countries still lag behind other countries in terms of size and regularity of investments in HPC. The table here compares the HPC capacity of the BRICS countries, which together represent almost half of the world population. As a reference, in 2018, South Africa's GDP was 29.1% lower than Argentina's and only 11.2% higher than Colombia's, the two countries in Latin America with largest GDPs after Brazil and Mexico. In spite of the overall picture described here, the landscape of the Latin American HPC ecosystem for science is promising, with many initiatives and outstanding concrete results.
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