Making Supercomputing Available to All Cuban Researchers

Abstract

Scientists in Cuba must get up to date with the latest trends and best practices in scientific computing. As a consequence of the socioeconomic and geopolitical situation in and around Cuba, a lack of financial means restricts Cuban researchers' access to the supercomputing infrastructures, techniques, and tools that are urgently needed to support the increasing use of computational tools and efficient data processing in different areas, especially those related to public health.In the following article, I recount my story as a young researcher and my efforts to make nationwide high-performance computing (HPC) services available to all Cuban scientists. This effort was motivated by my research experiences 15 years earlier. I began working with complex images acquired with a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and found myself faced with the problem of phase residues, a major drawback for the bidimensional phase unwrapping process that is usually performed when processing phase images in several health-related applications. My experiments applied de-noising algorithms to complex images combining nonlinear filters based on order statistics methods in the wavelet domain, which demanded high computational power. The unavailability of HPC facilities imposed severe challenges for the research process required to achieve my proposed objectives. DE-NOISING COMPLEX IMAGESI graduated in 1999 from the School of Electrical Engineering of the Universidad Central "Marta Abreu" of Las Villas (UCLV) in Cuba. Since 2003, I have been linked to the Center for Studies on Electronics and Information Technologies (CEETI), where I did my PhD studies on de-noising complex images, meanwhile I served as head of the Telecommunications Department in the Electrical Engineering School. Upon receiving my PhD in 2007, I was nominated to and accepted the role of director of the UCLV Central ICT Department.

Achievement and challenges of the Cuban Science, Technology, and Innovation System: A perspective on computational science

“…The HPC-Cuba project includes HPC infrastructure at three points: UCI in Havana (west of Cuba), UCLV in Santa Clara (central), and UO in Santiago de Cuba (east). Several free software-management platforms have been installed for services orchestration (foreman), configuration management (Puppet/Ansible), and management of computing resources (slurm) with CentOS, as well as a national Lightweight Directory Access Protocol system for access to distributed infrastructure [30]. On the other hand, collaborations with internationally recognized supercomputing centers have increased the technical and academic expertise of the Cuban researchers in HPC techniques.…”