“The RISC2 project has proven to be a team effort in which European and Latin American partners worked together to drive HPC collaboration forward. We have been able to create a lively and active community across the Atlantic to stimulate dialogue and boost cooperation that won’t die with RISC2’s formal end”, says Fabrizio Gagliardi, manager director of RISC2.

Since 2021, this knowledge-sharing network has organised webinars, summer schools, meetings with policymakers and participated in conferences and dissemination events on both sides of the Atlantic. The project also resulted in the HPC Observatory Repository — a collection of documents and training materials produced as part of the project – and the White Paper on HPC R&I Collaboration Opportunities, a document that reviews the key socio-economic and environmental factors and trends that influence HPC needs.

These were two of the issues highlighted by European Commission officials and experts during the final evaluation of the project, which could provide continuity to the work carried out by the consortium over the last three years, in line with the wishes of the partners and the advice of the evaluators. “Beyond RISC2, we should keep the momentum and leverage the importance of Latin America in the frame of the Green Deal actions: HPC stakeholders should encourage policymakers to build bilateral agreements and offer open calls focused on HPC collaboration“, reflects Fabrizio Gagliardi.

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Given the nature of the project, RISC2 could not fail to be represented through its partners and with a strong presence in the event’s program. Carlos J. Barrios, researcher from the Universidad Industrial de Santander and RISC2 partner was responsible for opening CARLA, with his address setting the tone for the conference, emphasizing the importance of collaborative efforts and knowledge sharing in furthering the frontiers of HPC.

Fabrizio Gagliardi, the coordinator of RISC2, also took center stage with a special talk that introduced the audience to the mission and objectives of the RISC2 project. The presentation shed light on the pivotal role that RISC2 plays in advancing HPC research and development of the cooperation between the two continents in this field. Gagliardi participated in the EuroHPCLatam panel: Policy and Global Actions, which included representatives from Red Clara, CAF and the Ministry of CyT Colombia. This panel explored the policies and global actions required to propel HPC forward in Latin America, emphasizing collaboration between key stakeholders.

Another highlight of CARLA 2023 was the tribute to Mateo Valero, one of the promoters of RISC2. Valero’s dedication and contributions to the field were celebrated through an award with his name and one he was the first recepient, underscoring the lasting impact of his work on the entire HPC community.

This event was particularly important as it coincided with the end of the RISC2 project and the presentation of its results. Over the course of three years, the initiative has strengthened contacts and promoted the exchange of knowledge between researchers from Latin America and Europe through the organization of nine webinars, the support of several schools, workshops, and other training events in the field for young students and researchers. During this period, RISC2 partners also participated in several conferences and ceremonies with policymakers to raise awareness of the importance of continuing to support and prioritize this area of research in the future.

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The session began with a welcome and introduction by Mateo Valero (BSC), one of the main drivers of this cooperation and a leading name in the field of HPC. This intervention was later complemented by Fabrizio Gagliardi (BSC). Afterward, Elsa Carvalho (INESC TEC) presented the work done in terms of communication by the RISC2 team, an important segment for all the news and achievements to reach all the partners and countries involved.

Carlos J. Barrios Hernandez then presented the work done within the HPC Observatory, a relevant source of information that European and Latin American research organizations can address with HPC and/or AI issues.

The session closed with an important and pertinent debate on how to strengthen cooperation in HPC between the European Union and Latin America, in which all participants contributed and gave their opinion, committing to efforts so that the work developed within the framework of RISC2 is continued.

What our partners had to say about the meeting?

Rafael Mayo Garcia, CIEMAT:

“The policy event organized by RISC2 in Brussels was of utmost importance for the development of HPC and digital capabilities for a shared infrastructure between EU and LAC. Even more, it has had crucial contributions to international entities such as CYTED, the Ibero-American Programme for the Development of Science and Technology. On the CIEMAT side, it has been a new step beyond for building and participating in a HPC shared ecosystem.”

Esteban Meneses, CeNAT:

“In Costa Rica, CeNAT plays a critical role in fostering technological change. To achieve that goal, it is fundamental to synchronize our efforts with other key players, particularly government institutions. The event policy in Brussels was a great opportunity to get closer to our science and technology ministry and start a dialogue on the importance of HPC, data science, and artificial intelligence for bringing about the societal changes we aim for.”

Esteban Mocskos, UBA:

“The Policy Event recently held in Brussels and organized by the RISC2 project had several remarkable points. The gathering of experts in HPC research and management in Latin America and Europe served to plan the next steps in the joint endeavor to deepen the collaboration in this field. The advance in management policies, application optimization, and user engagement are fundamental topics treated during the main sessions and also during the point-to-point talks in every corner of the meeting room.
I can say that this meeting will also spawn different paths in these collaboration efforts that we’ll surely see their results during the following years with a positive impact on both sides of this fruitful relationship: Latin America and Europe.”

Sergio Nesmachnow, Universidad de la República:

“The National Supercomputing Center (Uruguay) and Universidad de la República have led the development of HPC strategies and technologies and their application to relevant problems in Uruguay. Specific meetings such as the policy event organized by RISC2 in Brussels are key to present and disseminate the current developments and achievements to relevant political and technological leaders in our country, so that they gain knowledge about the usefulness of HPC technologies and infrastructure to foster the development of national scientific research in capital areas such as sustainability, energy, and social development. It was very important to present the network of collaborators in Latin America and Europe and to show the involvement of institutional and government agencies.

Within the contacts and talks during the organization of the meeting, we introduced the projecto to national authorities, including the National Director of Science and Technology, Ministry of Education and Culture, and the President of the National Agency for Research and Innovation, as well as the Uruguayan Agency for International Cooperation and academic authorities from all institutions involved in the National Supercomputing Center initiative. We hope the established contacts can result in productive joint efforts to foster the development of HPC and related scientific areas in our country and the region.”

Carla Osthoff, LNCC:

“In Brazil, LNCC is critical in providing High Performance Computing Resources for the Research Community and training Human Resources and fostering new technologies. The policy event organized by RISC2 in Brussels was fundamental to synchronizing LNCC efforts with other government institutions and international  entities. On the LNCC side, it has been a new step beyond building and participating in an HPC-shared ecosystem.

Specific meetings such as the policy event organized by RISC2 in Brussels  were very important to present the network of collaborators in Latin America and Europe and to show the involvement of institutional and government agencies.

As a result of joint activities in research and development in the areas of information and communication technologies (ICT), artificial intelligence, applied mathematics, and computational modelling, with emphasis on the areas of scientific computing and data science, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) have been signed between LNCC and Inria/France. As a  result of new joint activities, LNCC and INESC TEC/Portugal are starting  collaboration through INESC TEC International Visiting Researcher Programme 2023.”

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Check the agenda:

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On November 7, 2022, LNCC researchers, Carla Osthoff and Kary Ocaña, participated in a seminar in collaboration with our partner Inria, with a presentation entitle “Developing Efficient Scientific Gateways for Bioinformatics in Supercomputer Environments Supported by Artificial Intelligence”. The seminar aimed at promoting the interaction between LNCC’s and Inria’s high-performance computing researchers.

On November 18, Carla Osthoff participated in a seminar organized by the University of Campinas, where she presented the Santos Dumont Supercomputer. The event aimed to promote the exchange of the best HPC practices, promoting the interaction between computer science researchers towards the definition of a coordinated policy and a concrete roadmap for the future.

On November 23, Carla Osthoff also presented the Santos Dumont Supercomputer, on an online lecture, organized by the Research Centre in Digitalization and Intelligent Robotics of the Polytechnic Institute of Bragança, promoting the knowledge exchange between both regions.

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Several factors contributed to the catastrophic outcomes of the Black Death. The crises was boosted by the lack of two important components: knowledge and technology. There was no clue about the spread dynamics of the disease, and containment policies were desperately based on assumptions or beliefs. Some opted for self-isolation to get away from the “bad air” that was believed to be the cause of the illness [2]. Others thought the plague was a divine punishment and persecuted the heretics in order to “appease the heavens” [3]. Though the first of these two strategies was actually very effective, the second one only increased the tragedy of that scenario. 

The bubonic plague of the 14th century is a great example of how unfortunate ignorance can be in the context of epidemics. If the transmission mechanisms are not well-understood, we are not able to design productive measures against them. We may end up −such as our medieval predecessors− making things much more worse. Fortunately, the advances in science and technology have provided humanity with powerful tools to comprehend infectious diseases and rapidly develop response plans. In this particular matter, epidemic models and simulations have become crucial. 

In the recent COVID-19 events, many public health authorities relied on the outcomes of models, so as to determine the most probable paths of the epidemic and make informed decisions regarding sanitary measures [4]. Epidemic models have been around for a long time, and have become more and more sophisticated. One reason is the fact that they feed on data that has to be collected and processed, and which has increased in quantity and variety.  

Data contains interesting patterns that give hints about the influence of apparently non-epidemiological factors such as mobility and interaction type [5]. This is how, in the 19th century, John Snow managed to discover the cause of a cholera epidemic in Soho. He plotted the registered cholera cases in a map and saw they clustered around a water pump that he presumed was contaminated [6]. Thanks to Dr. Snow’s findings, water quality started to be considered as an important component of public health. 

As models grow in intricacy, the demand for more powerful computing systems also increases. In advanced approaches such as agent-based [7] and network (graph) models [8], every person is represented inside a complex framework in which the infection spreads according to specific rules. These rules could be related to the nature of the relations between individuals, their number of contacts, the places they visit, disease characteristics, and even stochastic influences. Frameworks are commonly composed of millions of individuals too, because we often want to analyze countrywide effects. 

In brief, to unravel epidemic dynamics we need to process and produce a lot of accurate information, and we need to do it fast. High-performance computing (HPC) systems provide high-spec hardware and support advanced techniques such as parallel computing, which accelerate calculation by using several resources at a time to perform one or different tasks concurrently. This is an advantage for stochastic epidemic models that require hundreds of independent executions to deliver reliable outputs. Frameworks with millions of nodes or agents need several GB of memory to be processed, which is a requirement that can be met only by HPC systems. 

Based on the work of Cruz et al. [9], we developed a model that represents the spread dynamics of COVID-19 in Costa Rica [10]. This model consists of a contact network of five million nodes, in which every Costa Rican citizen has a family, school, work, or random connection with their neighbors. These relations impact the probability of getting infected, as well as the “infection status” of the neighbors. The infection status varies with time, as people evolve from not having symptoms to have mild, severe, or critical conditions. People may be asymptomatic as well. The model also addresses variations in location, school and workplace sizes, age, mobility, and vaccination rates. In addition, some of these inputs are stochastic. 

Such model takes only a few hours to be simulated in an HPC cluster, when normal systems would require much more time. We managed to evaluate scenarios in which different sanitary measures were changed or eliminated. This analysis brought interesting results, such as that going to a meeting with our family or friends could be as harmful as attending a concert with dozens of strangers, in terms of the additional infections that these activities would generate. Such findings are valuable inputs for health authorities, because they demonstrate that preventing certain behaviors in the population can delay the peak of infections and give them more time to save lives. 

Even though HPC has been fundamental in computational epidemiology to give key insights into epidemic dynamics, we still have to leverage this technology in some contexts. For example, we must first strengthen health and information systems in developing countries to get the maximum advantage of HPC and epidemic models. The above can be achieved through inter–institutional and international collaboration, but also through national policies that support research and development. If we encourage the study of infectious diseases, we benefit from this knowledge in a way that we can approach other pandemics better in the future. 

References

[1] Encyclopedia Britannica. n.d. Crisis, recovery, and resilience: Did the Middle Ages end?. [online] Available at: <https://www.britannica.com/topic/history-of-Europe/Crisis-recovery-and-resilience-Did-the-Middle-Ages-end> [Accessed 13 September 2022]. 

[2] Mellinger, J., 2006. Fourteenth-Century England, Medical Ethics, and the Plague. AMA Journal of Ethics, 8(4), pp.256-260. 

[3] Carr, H., 2020. Black Death Quarantine: How Did We Try To Contain The Deadly Disease?. [online] Historyextra.com. Available at: <https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/plague-black-death-quarantine-history-how-stop-spread/> [Accessed 13 September 2022]. 

[4] McBryde, E., Meehan, M., Adegboye, O., Adekunle, A., Caldwell, J., Pak, A., Rojas, D., Williams, B. and Trauer, J., 2020. Role of modelling in COVID-19 policy development. Paediatric Respiratory Reviews, 35, pp.57-60. 

[5] Pasha, D., Lundeen, A., Yeasmin, D. and Pasha, M., 2021. An analysis to identify the important variables for the spread of COVID-19 using numerical techniques and data science. Case Studies in Chemical and Environmental Engineering, 3, p.100067. 

[6] Bbc.co.uk. 2014. Historic Figures: John Snow (1813 – 1858). [online] Available at: <https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/snow_john.shtml> [Accessed 13 September 2022]. 

[7] Publichealth.columbia.edu. 2022. Agent-Based Modeling. [online] Available at: <https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/research/population-health-methods/agent-based-modeling> [Accessed 13 September 2022]. 

[8] Keeling, M. and Eames, K., 2005. Networks and epidemic models. Journal of The Royal Society Interface, 2(4), pp.295-307. 

[9] Cruz, E., Maciel, J., Clozato, C., Serpa, M., Navaux, P., Meneses, E., Abdalah, M. and Diener, M., 2021. Simulation-based evaluation of school reopening strategies during COVID-19: A case study of São Paulo, Brazil. Epidemiology and Infection, 149. 

[10] Abdalah, M., Soto, C., Arce, M., Cruz, E., Maciel, J., Clozato, C. and Meneses, E., 2022. Understanding COVID-19 Epidemic in Costa Rica Through Network-Based Modeling. Communications in Computer and Information Science, pp.61-75. 

By CeNAT

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Rafael Mayo Garcia joined the scientific committee at the Artificial Intelligence for Science, Industry and Society (AISIS) 2021.

AISIS is a conference that brings together scientists, industry representatives and policy makers and discusses the implementation of AI in a variety of areas and disciplines. This year’s edition had a great focus on how AI has facilitated the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Hosted online, the event took place at National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).

According to Rafael Mayo Garcia, he worked “on the definition of the agenda and the review of contributions” with different members from around the world. The program and agenda in which RISC2’s partner had an important role in was composed by several keynote speakers, topics and convenors.

Learn more about this event and Rafael Mayo Garcia’s role in it here.

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