Overcoming sustainability challenges
In this flurry of activity, however, HPC developments in the ASEAN bloc have been lopsided, with Singapore taking up the lion’s share of construction and investment. Dr. Piyawut Srichaikul, co-chair of the ASEAN HPC Taskforce and chief executive of the National Science and Technology Development Agency’s Supercomputer Center (ThaiSC), shared that only about half the countries in the bloc are actively pursuing HPC goals.
“It’s been some 30 years since HPC become a generic term, but I don’t think ASEAN has an HPC regional landscape yet,” Srichaikul told Supercomputing Asia. “I recall meeting colleagues in many gatherings related to HPC on both the infrastructure and application community sides from Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc. But, to my knowledge, only Singapore has steadily progressed during the past 30 years.”
Srichaikul attributes this to HPC infrastructure sustainability problems among bloc countries that have fallen behind Singapore, including Thailand. After various planning permutations, ThaiSC was founded in 2019 with a mission of providing HPC services for research and development in Thailand.
Located in Thailand Science Park north of Bangkok, the center has used its initial TARA system to service local users, take part in screening existing drugs for efficacy against COVID-19, and analyzing the coronavirus genome. ThaiSC is now procuring a new petaFLOPS flagship system, LANTA, that will be Thailand’s first large-scale liquid-cooled supercomputer when launched in 2022, Srichaikul added.
“Competing to be on the [TOP500] list is not our prime objective,” said Srichaikul. “This new system is small compared to those in the top rankings, but it does not matter; we look at HPC as a fabric of science and technology development. HPC infrastructure is a needed ingredient for computational science and engineering, as well as for science, technology and innovation to accelerate.”
ThaiSC is now focused on growing its capabilities to match those of other HPC centers, and engaging users throughout Thailand including scientists and businesspeople. Meanwhile, Srichaikul is hopeful about the future of supercomputing in the wider region.
“With current ASEAN HPC priority and fast growing global HPC-AI, my guess is we will see new spots of large HPC facilities coming up in ASEAN,” he said. “A sharing infrastructure model in ASEAN will rely on centralized or a few distributed hubs with some type of exchanging value model. However, collaboration between supercomputing centers by nature is not restricted within regions.
Therefore, Srichaikul continued, these ASEAN-distributed hubs will open doorways to global HPC resources.
“Human capacity development, on the other hand, must be carried out by each ASEAN member state as a priority area,” he added.
