Analytics, Computing, and Complex Systems Laboratory

Last updated
Analytics, Computing, and Complex Systems Laboratory
(ACCeSs@AIM)
EstablishedMarch 8, 2018;3 years ago (2018-03-08)
Research typeApplied
Field of research
Data Science, Complex Systems
Managing Director
Dr. Christopher P. Monterola
Location Makati, Philippines
14°33′8.9″N121°1′07.7″E / 14.552472°N 121.018806°E / 14.552472; 121.018806 Coordinates: 14°33′8.9″N121°1′07.7″E / 14.552472°N 121.018806°E / 14.552472; 121.018806
Campus Asian Institute of Management
Affiliations Asian Institute of Management
Website asite.aim.edu/access-lab/

The Analytics, Computing, and Complex Systems (ACCeSs@AIM) Laboratory is a R&D laboratory in Makati, Metro Manila, Philippines. It is situated within the Asian Institute of Management (AIM).

Contents

ACCeSs@AIM is AIM's first data science R&D consulting arm. It houses full-time research scientists and research engineers and hosts the fastest supercomputer in the Philippines, among the fastest in Southeast Asia. ACCeSs is envisaged to lead and advocate for the use of complex systems science, data analytics, artificial intelligence, and computational models to support innovation in industries, government agencies, and other sectors.

Background

The Analytics, Computing, and Complex Systems laboratory, also known by its short name ACCeSs@AIM, is situated within the Asian Institute of Management (AIM) in Makati. [1] It is under AIM's School of Innovation, Technology and Entrepreneurship. [2]

The facility was launched on March 8, 2018 by the Asian Institute of Management (AIM) with Acer Inc. Acer founder Stan Shih who is also part of AIM's international board of governors for more than three decades was also in attendance during the launch of the laboratory to concurrently introduce to the public the Acer-developed supercomputer he donated to the lab. [1] [3]

Usage

ACCeSs@AIM is meant to support the computing needs of Asian Institute of Management's graduate students and faculty, as well as researchers and its other stakeholders. It is optimized for Artificial Intelligence research meant to aid the growth of businesses and other organizations through computing technology. The laboratory is meant to encourage public-to-private partnership between the academia, business sectors and the government in the field of research and development. [1]

It is also specifically meant to complement AIM's Master of Science in Data Science program [4] and its PhD in Data Science program.

To date, through the MSc. in Data Science program, ACCeSs has completed thirty-nine (39) capstone projects with government agencies including the Commission on Higher Education (Philippines), the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, and the Armed Forces of the Philippines, local and multinational corporations including Analog Devices, Western Digital Corporation, Moog, Inc., Reckitt Benckiser, ProWeaver, Inc., and Qavalo, Inc., to name a few, and international organizations like the Asian Development Bank and Unilab Foundation.

Supercomputer

ACCeSs@AIM's supercomputer, a.k.a. Super Jojie, is provided by Taiwanese technology firm Acer and was donated by the StanShih Foundation to AIM. [2] [5] The supercomputer has a capacity of 500 terabytes and computing speed of 12.9 teraflops (CPU)/1.2 petaflops (GPU) making it the fastest supercomputer in the Philippines [1] and among the fastest in Southeast Asia. [3] [6] It was fully operational in April 2018. [7]

At the time of donation, Acer Philippines described the supercomputer's capability as roughly equivalent to 250 "high end" laptops combined. In terms of storage it described the supercomputer as capable of holding "50 years of movie hours". [8] Acer has since reinforced the computing power of Supercomputer Jojie, doubling its GPU speed to 1.2 petaflops in 2021.

Related Research Articles

Supercomputer Extremely powerful computer for its era

A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS). Since 2017, there are supercomputers which can perform over 1017 FLOPS (a hundred quadrillion FLOPS, 100 petaFLOPS or 100 PFLOPS).

FLOPS Measure of computer performance

In computing, floating point operations per second is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate measure than measuring instructions per second.

IBM Blue Gene Series of supercomputers by IBM

Blue Gene is an IBM project aimed at designing supercomputers that can reach operating speeds in the petaFLOPS (PFLOPS) range, with low power consumption.

Cray Inc., a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is an American supercomputer manufacturer headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It also manufactures systems for data storage and analytics. Several Cray supercomputer systems are listed in the TOP500, which ranks the most powerful supercomputers in the world.

MareNostrum

MareNostrum is the main supercomputer in the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. It is the most powerful supercomputer in Spain, one of thirteen supercomputers in the Spanish Supercomputing Network and one of the seven supercomputers of the European infrastructure PRACE.

TeraGrid

TeraGrid was an e-Science grid computing infrastructure combining resources at eleven partner sites. The project started in 2001 and operated from 2004 through 2011.

National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center Supercomputer facility operated by the US Department of Energy in Berkeley, California

The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), is a high performance computing (supercomputer) user facility operated by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for the United States Department of Energy Office of Science. As the mission computing center for the Office of Science, NERSC houses high performance computing and data systems used by 7,000 scientists at national laboratories and universities around the country. NERSC's newest and largest supercomputer is Cori, which was ranked 5th on the TOP500 list of world's fastest supercomputers in November 2016. NERSC is located on the main Berkeley Lab campus in Berkeley, California.

Roadrunner (supercomputer)

Roadrunner was a supercomputer built by IBM for the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, USA. The US$100-million Roadrunner was designed for a peak performance of 1.7 petaflops. It achieved 1.026 petaflops on May 25, 2008, to become the world's first TOP500 LINPACK sustained 1.0 petaflops system.

TOP500 Ranking of the 500 most powerful supercomputers

The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these updates always coincides with the International Supercomputing Conference in June, and the second is presented at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference in November. The project aims to provide a reliable basis for tracking and detecting trends in high-performance computing and bases rankings on HPL, a portable implementation of the high-performance LINPACK benchmark written in Fortran for distributed-memory computers.

Pleiades (supercomputer)

Pleiades is a petascale supercomputer housed at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at NASA's Ames Research Center located at Moffett Field near Mountain View, California. It is maintained by NASA and partners Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Intel.

Exascale computing refers to computing systems capable of calculating at least 1018 floating point operations per second (1 exaFLOPS). The terminology generally refers to the performance of supercomputer systems, with the Fugaku being the first supercomputer in history to hit this milestone (HPL-AI benchmark). In April 2020, the distributed computing network Folding@home attained one exaFLOPS of computing performance.

Supercomputing in India has a history going back to the 1980s. The Government of India created an indigenous development programme as they had difficulty purchasing foreign supercomputers. As of November 2020 when ranking by number of supercomputer systems in the TOP500 list, India is ranked 63rd in the world, with the PARAM Siddhi-AI being the fastest supercomputer in India.

History of supercomputing Aspect of history

The term supercomputing arose in the late 1920s in the United States in response to the IBM tabulators at Columbia University. The CDC 6600, released in 1964, is sometimes considered the first supercomputer. However, some earlier computers were considered supercomputers for their day such as the 1960 UNIVAC LARC, the IBM 7030 Stretch, and the Manchester Atlas, both in 1962—all of which were of comparable power; and the 1954 IBM NORC.

Supercomputing in Europe Overview of supercomputing in Europe

Several centers for supercomputing exist across Europe, and distributed access to them is coordinated by European initiatives to facilitate high-performance computing. One such initiative, the HPC Europa project, fits within the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA), which was formed in 2002 as a consortium of eleven supercomputing centers from seven European countries. Operating within the CORDIS framework, HPC Europa aims to provide access to supercomputers across Europe.

Yellowstone (supercomputer)

Yellowstone was the inaugural supercomputer at the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC) in Cheyenne, Wyoming. It was installed, tested, and readied for production in the summer of 2012. The Yellowstone supercomputing cluster was decommissioned on December 31, 2017, being replaced by its successor Cheyenne.

NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center

The NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC) is a high-performance computing (HPC) and data archival facility located in Cheyenne, Wyoming that provides advanced computing services to researchers in the Earth system sciences.

Cray XC40 Supercomputer manufactured by Cray

The Cray XC40 is a massively parallel multiprocessor supercomputer manufactured by Cray. It consists of Intel Haswell Xeon processors, with optional Nvidia Tesla or Intel Xeon Phi accelerators, connected together by Cray's proprietary "Aries" interconnect, stored in air-cooled or liquid-cooled cabinets. The XC series supercomputers are available with the Cray DataWarp applications I/O accelerator technology.

The Cray XC50 is a massively parallel multiprocessor supercomputer manufactured by Cray. The machine can support Intel Xeon processors, as well as Cavium ThunderX2 processors, Xeon Phi processors and NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPUs. The processors are connected by Cray's proprietary "Aries" interconnect, in a dragonfly network topology. The XC50 is an evolution of the XC40, with the main difference being the support of Tesla P100 processors and the use of Cray software release CLE 6 or 7.

European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking

The European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking is a public-private partnership in High Performance Computing (HPC), enabling the pooling of European Union–level resources with the resources of participating EU Member States and participating associated states of the Horizon 2020 programme, as well as private stakeholders. The Joint Undertaking has the twin stated aims of developing a pan-European supercomputing infrastructure, and supporting research and innovation activities. Located in Luxembourg City, Luxembourg, the Joint Undertaking started operating in November 2018 and will remain operational until the end of 2026.

JUWELS is a supercomputer developed by Atos Forschungszentrum Jülich, capable of 70.980 petaflops. It replaced the now disused JUQUEEN supercomputer. JUWELS Booster Module is ranked as the eight fastest supercomputer in the world. The JUWELS Booster Module is part of a modular system architecture and a second Xeon based JUWELS Module ranks separately as the 52nd fastest supercomputer in the world.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Arayata, Maria Cristina (9 March 2018). "AIM, Acer launch PH's 1st data science corporate lab". Philippine News Agency. Retrieved 21 April 2018.
  2. 1 2 Vicente, Reynaldo (12 February 2018). "AIM to produce highly-trained data scientists". Upgrade. Retrieved 21 April 2018.
  3. 1 2 "Acer, AIM open corporate research lab in Philippines". Taipei Times. CNA. 10 March 2018. Retrieved 21 April 2018.
  4. "Asian Institute of Management to use Acer supercomputer for big data, AI". ABS-CBN News. 13 February 2018. Retrieved 21 April 2018.
  5. "Acer supercomputer powers AIM first data science corporate lab". Malaya Business Insights. 21 March 2018. Retrieved 21 April 2018.
  6. Encarnacion, Andre (July 2021). "Southeast Asia's Supercomputing Sights" (PDF). Supercomputing Asia (10): 10–15. Retrieved 1 December 2021.
  7. "Acer Founder Stan Shih Visits AIM's Supercomputer Lab". Asian Institute of Management. 27 February 2018. Retrieved 21 April 2018.
  8. Afinidad-Bernardo, Deni Rose (24 April 2018). "Check out Philippines' fastest supercomputer". The Philippine Star. Retrieved 21 April 2018.