Expanding Ecuador’s Supercomputing Future with Yachay and OpenPOWER

By Alejandra Gando, Director of Communications, Yachay EP

The pursuit of supercomputing represents a major step forward for Ecuador and Yachay EP, with IBM and OpenPOWER, is leading the way.

Yachay, a planned city for technological innovation and knowledge intensive businesses combining the best ideas, human talent and state-of-the-art infrastructure, is tasked with creating the worldwide scientific applications necessary to achieve Good Living (Buen Vivir). In its constant quest to push Ecuador towards a knowledge-based economy, Yachay found a partner in OpenPOWER member IBM to create a source of information and research on issues such as oil, climate and food genomics.

Yachay will benefit from state of the art technology, IBM’s new OpenPOWER LC servers infused with innovations developed by the OpenPOWER community, in the search and improvement of production of non-traditional exports based on the rich biodiversity of Ecuador. It will be able to use genomic research to improve the quality of products and become more competitive in the global market. Genomic research revolutionizes both the food industry and medicine. So far the local genomic field had slowly advanced by the amount of data, creating an obstacle to the investigation.

“For IBM it is of great importance to provide an innovative solution for the country, the region and the world, in order to provide research and allow Ecuador to pioneer in areas such as genomics, environment and new sources of economic growth” says Patricio Espinosa, General Manager, IBM Ecuador.

Installed in an infrastructure based on the IBM POWER8 servers and storage solutions with software implementation capacity of advanced analytics and cognitive computing infrastructure, this system acquired by Yachay EP enables the use of HPC real-time applications with large data volumes to expand capabilities of scientists to make quantitative predictions. IBM systems use a data-centric approach, integrating and linking data to predictive simulation techniques that expand the limits of scientific knowledge.

The new supercomputing project will allow Yachay to foster projects with a higher technology component, to create simulations and to do projects with the capacity of impacting the way science is done in the country.

Héctor Rodríguez, General Manager of the Public Company Yachay, noted with pride the consolidation of an increasingly strong ecosystem for innovation, entrepreneurship and technological development in Ecuador.

Once the supercomputer is in place the researchers at Yachay will be able to work in projects that require supercomputing enabling better and faster results. By using the power of high performance computing in these analyzes it enables different organizations or companies to maximize their operations and minimize latency of their systems, allowing them to obtain further findings in their research.

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