 Next up is Hector and Dieter. We're going to talk about the birth of HPC in Cuba. Good morning. My name is Hector, and I'm happy to be here to tell you what we are doing for making HPC service available for Cuban scientists. The lowest you can see are institutions that are supporting our projects. The BRID U.S. that is the Flemish University Council. Also, BRID.CU is a collaboration on projects with Flemish University and six Cuban universities, where three of them are very involved in this project that we called HPC Cuba. We want to make HPC service available for all Cuban scientists, so our mission is to provide centralized access to HPC infrastructure, also to offer training to our HPC staff, and also to support our users belonging to the higher education system, and also to our research institution in Cuba. The HPC Cuba project that we can also call Cuba Center for Academic Supercomputing, it was sold with a roughly distribution of the HPC infrastructure in three main points in Havana, Santa Clara, and Santiago de Cuba. In three universities, the University of Informary Science in Havana, the Central University of Las Pillas in Santa Clara, and University of Oriente in Santiago de Cuba. Some facts about Cuba. So Cuba is the biggest island, the Caribbean. Also with the tropical climates, it's a tourist destination. Also, our high education standard is true. So we are friendly people. So Cuba is also a safe place in America. But we are still living on the USA embargo. So it costs also limitation, like the ban, which also resists access to the information and internet, because some sites are broken, our QIPs. So also the access to the infrastructure become problematic sometimes. An important remark, it's the Americans blocking their sites for Cuban access. It's not the Cuban government blocking the access for the Cuban population. Many people think it's the other way around. Thank you for the clarification on that. This is Cuba. We are very close to USA in Florida. So you can find us, the map. OK, this pro idea is starting in 2015. When we start two small HPC clusters. One in Santa Clara, UCRB, and the other one in Oriente University in the eastern part of the country. But our goal is to provide access to the whole country. Now it's starting a new one in Havana in the University of Informatics Science. Maybe you have heard about the Linus-Nova distribution that was developed there. But also in Cuba, you can take a walk, ride in nights or cars. And I enjoyed the Marcon during the evening. So in Santa Clara, you can find the Center University of Latvia with a very nice university campus in a very natural environment with a lot of streets. Also, you can find beautiful beaches in the north coast of the province, so in Cayo Santa Maria, where we have heard many workshops regarding ICT. In Oriente, it's also a nice place with very friendly people. Our vengeance, merchants, become Cubans so immediately. So it's difficult to recognize, to deter, but maybe because he is taller than Cubans. So highlighted in red, the HPC cluster in University of Oriente. Also in the University of Las Villas. What we are doing right now, so our plan now, immediately for 2017, is to insert two IBM clusters with the capacity of about 600 cores and one terabyte of run in Havana and Santa Clara. Also in Santa Clara, a big data cluster with 20 servers and two NVIDIA GPU cards. In Oriente University, a cluster with similar capacity but using infinite band technology for the interconnectivity. So that is what we are talking about. So one of these in Oriente was already a start, where either Joe or other specialists are working hard to make this possible. So it is our goal for this year. So maybe you can remark here that the hardware is donated by Gent University. It's impossible for CUMU universities to buy IBM or Dell or HP hardware. It's illegal for Dell to export to Cuba. If a Dell salesperson sells to CUMU university, you lose this job. But thanks to collaboration with the Flemish universities, we've been able to establish some infrastructure in Cuba. So everything we are using is free software. So far, we have Debian as operating system that using Torqued, PBS, and Maui for managing keywords and jobs. Also, it's in Gangnam for monitoring purposes. But we are exploring a new alternative for the new implementation, maybe using Centov and Slur, and maybe Oresing. So that is what we are thinking about. We are exploring to do that. We have offered web portals to support users. So this is another example in the University of Oriente. Also, a wiki, I'm sorry for the language, it's called it for Cuban users. Also, building different ways to access to the cluster for monitoring purposes. For example, you can access using SSH for look, the Cuban state. You can do that. Also, using the web interface. The same for the job states. It's more comfortable for non-IT user to use the web access. And also, you are creating some templates for script tools submitting jobs. In the web, via web also, it's possible. So now we can see how many institutions in Cuba are using our HPC facilities. And also, you can find a user from BUB. So I have no idea what he's doing in our cluster, but he's here. Also, people from Brazil, from Brazilian University, because you are helping often. We are helping Brazilian guys. So we are happy with that. With the users, it's a lot of Cuban universities in different provinces. So let me to remark, there are a lot of universities in Cuba. That's a lot of very small universities. Almost every little town has its own university. So we have infrastructure in the three main, the biggest, the three main universities of the island. And as you can see, the infrastructure is working well already on a high level, using nothing but free and open source solutions. And all kinds of institutions and research institutes are using already our infrastructure. And that's what this graph shows. OK. So some samples of scientific results in Cuba using our HPC, for example, for video encoding in the Cuba digital television broadcasting, for example. Also, for sign up processing users, there are networks for health applications, also for the environment, also for the chemistry applications where they couldn't do the job with a very good laptop with 16-year-round. It was not possible, but in our close to the Oriental University, in 15 minutes, it will solve. So other scientific papers. So it's just to have an idea that our scientists in Cuba are using what we are doing. So now we have a national strategy that includes capacity building. So it will be important for us to train our HPC staff developing training or workshops. It could be in Cuba or in Belgium. Also, supporting the users and establishment of synergies with our institution. So this is our national strategy. This is our first workshop in Santa Clara with the participation of a HPC expert from University who was sponsored by Blear. So we can see. Alvaro, you can see him here. So Alvaro is here. Everybody's experience of working with Cuba. So Alvaro could be a very good reference of Cuba or a job. Also, Rudi is here and Dieter, of course. But also some people from Ecuador and Peru were trained because it had regional impacts also. And of course, for our national strategy, we have to face some drawbacks. For example, the ban wish also the access policy because sometimes the SSH ports are broken. When you go from another institution to another, so we have to face that or some block house that we have. And of course, the USA trade embargo is still present. And nobody knows what we're trying to do in the future regarding Cuba. So we have to see. But now we are focused and to develop centralized authentication system with a national front end. Also, to improve our rates, our storage capacity, train our people, and make easier the user's installation by using some facilities that we will show now. This is our user management approach with national front end, with centralized authentication with redundancy, also the login notes that are connected to the head of the cluster, also access to the scratch user infinity ban and to the home of the user or the data user. So it's like that. So actually, the infrastructure is working at the separate universities and what you're working on now is like a layer on top of that, the national user accounts. So if you have a user account for HPC Cuba at your home university, you can access infrastructure at another university. Also, for making easier the installation for users, we are trying to use easy-read, where we can say that we already have a Cuban contribution to the easy-read community developing the jades. For example, I know that Kenneth has been our guide and also a supervisor of our developers. So we are also working, helping something with the clip or open forum. So maybe Kenneth can explain much more. OK, so it's a sample of the jade installation developed for our staff in Cuba. So guys, we need a HPC expert like you to join us in this trip to make it possible. So thank you very much for your attention. Thank you, Hector, and Peter. Questions? You said you've got an Harlem process. How many calls per subject? And the Harlem, how about six? If you've got any questions, repeat the question. Well, the hardware we're using is a game. I was going to say, you shouldn't look at that as less a generation. Those processes were very efficient for HPC code. Today, even people of procuring systems were getting 10, 12 code processes until pushed onto us. And there really aren't all that efficient. You can memory band with problems. And you should do some work on how efficient those processes are, maybe versus one with more broadband generation. Well, you see, actually, we're using the hardware that we can get our hands on. We don't really have the liberty to choose the hardware. We're just happy to receive these. These were good clusters working very well at Gent University. They were decommissioned for all kinds of reasons. And instead of showing them into the furnace, we decided to export them to Cuba and donate them to Cuba University. If you have another cluster available for us, please help us. So just wondering, where can we find more information about the ongoing projects that you're asking for HPC experts to get involved? What are the opportunities available? Where can we find more information? Please send us an email so we have your email. And then we can see. Box. Yes. In the future, we are always organizing trainings. Cubans are coming to Belgium. See, actually, it's here right now. We are sending experts to Cuba every time we have funds. We get funding from the Flemish Inter-University Council. And the deal is basically that it's volunteer work. But you get your ticket paid, your hotel service paid, you get a per diem. And what we see is people go there, and then they stay for an extra week, extra two weeks to go on holiday. And it's just fine. We are right now applying for a call. So we can promise anything. But maybe for the next three years, we can have some budgets supporting our projects. So we need some Europe experts to support us, to teaching our staff. So our staff can come here, and our trainers can go to Cuba also. So the question is about the electricity. Do we use UPS, or do we generate our own electricity? Well, the experience is that the electricity in Cuba is unstable. It's very normal to have small outages. We use UPS mostly to stabilize the mains current. And we have generators also. But outages are quite common. So we use UPS, also some inverters with batteries. It's not as sad to UPS. Of course, also generators. You should get your hands on hardware, because everything will move the energy control by the US in cargo. And you look into open hardware solutions, for now there are some major integrations, for instance, by integrating our processors. So that's a field that is a bit less controlled by the US. And actually, it's something that you see as a possibility. Or also, economically, it might be also difficult to have funding for collecting new hardware. Yes. So the question is, maybe we should focus on open hardware or open DC infrastructure instead of looking for US hardware providers. Yeah, maybe we can look into it. But for right now, I think financially, it would be very difficult for us to start building or to start looking in that direction. From up until now, we've depended on free hardware. Free is always cheaper than maybe open can be. Yes? The HPC will be used only for scientific research or also for public services in the future. OK, it could be used for anybody. So we are focused mainly now in this first step in scientific community, because the people that have more needs about HPC. But for one of the samples that I showed regarding to the video encoding for the national Cuban digital television broadcasting, it's not for scientific purposes. It's just for storage the materials in the format that they need, also for broadcasting to the Cuban people. Any more questions? Thank you. If not, thanks again to the human community.