Next Thursday the 1st and Friday the 2^nd of December will be the Tutorial of Grid Computing, in which UFRO and CTI-HPC UTFSM will participate, as one of the activities of the GISELA-Chile Project.  Cesar Fernández, Paola Arce and Raquel Pezoa will be in charge of the presentations related to the use of the grid, and Professor Julio López (UFRO) will present an introduction of the Voronoi tesellations algorithm that will be used to solve some problems of segmentation of biomedical images.

The activities will be held in the Aula Tecnológica of the Informatics Department of the UTFSM.

Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María has officially been named a CUDA Teaching Center by NVIDIA, the world leader in visual and high-performance computing. Our institution is the first in Chile to obtain this honor, and it is among the first CUDA Teaching Centers in Latin America.

CUDA is NVIDIA’s parallel computing architecture that enables dramatic increases in computing performance by harnessing the power of the graphics processing unit (GPU). CUDA Teaching Centers are recognized institutions that have integrated GPU computing techniques into their mainstream computer programming curriculum.

This distinction is an important milestone in our research and teaching activities on GPU computing, and it has been received at a very exciting time for our institution.

Our already-deployed 8-GPU computing cluster will enjoy a significant upgrade thanks to the donation of a large GPU cluster by professor Tsuyoshi Hamada, from the Nagasaki Advanced Computing Center. Also, as part of the CUDA Teaching Center program, NVIDIA will provide the Informatics Department with donated GPUs to help upgrade a teaching laboratory. With this infrastructure, UTFSM will strengthen its position as the Chilean leading center in GPU computing.

On the teaching track, the Informatics Department has committed to including GPU programming in CUDA as a permanent part of its curriculum. Meanwhile, UTFSM has already hosted other GPU-related training events, the most important having been the PASI school on massive parallelism held last summer. For this school, more than 80 students from all around the world attended a series of lectures given by world-class researchers on High-Performance Computing. In August 2011, CTI-HPC also hosted an intensive 4-week course on CUDA, attended by 30 participants from the university community who were enthusiastic about incorporating CUDA to their own work.

Our Center is organizing the second version of the Satellite Image Processing course, which is newly supported by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and the Computer Science Department at UTFSM. This course will be held between November 2nd and November 15th, 2011.

The course will be taught by John Stastny, Bryan Bagnall, and Lucas Keenan (SPAWAR Systems Center, Pacific,  USA).

The second version of the course will consider the revision of some  C++  and OpenCV topics in order to go  further with the use of the specialized software called  http://www.ossim.org/OSSIM/OSSIM_Home.html, which allows to perform satellite image processing.

As in the previous version of the course, at the end of the event, it will be possible to continue the related work in the CTI-HPC, as well as opportunities for collaboration with international projects, carrying undergraduate or graduate thesis.

Due to the successful collaboration with the ONR (Office of Naval Research) the opportunity to work alongside them in the satellite image processing area has arisen. Currently the ONR and CTI-HPC are looking for enthusiastic researchers in developing one of the following topics:

1. Ocean surface analysis. Study of oceanic sea surface (air/sea interations, oil slicks, thermal processes, etc), using dynamic equations, SAR, and MODIS.
2. Vessel classification from hyperspectral and multispectral data. Different approaches of Hyperspectral Image techniques for solving remote sensing image classification. These privide an important feature in material identification, discrimination, detection and classification.
3. Application of HPC in image processing. Implementation of Hyperspectral Image algorithms on HPC architectures (multi-computer clusters, hetereogeneous networks of computers, and specialized hardware architecture such as FPGA and GPU).
4. Ship detection. Development of ship detection algorithms using SAR platform, plays an important role in the field of marine monitoring.

Surely the study of one of these topics could be an excellent opportunity for the development of a thesis project.

The next visit from the ONR experts will be in November 2011 when they will give a background of these topics as well as the use of different tools for image processing.  We will keep you informed about the exact dates and duration of their visit in our News section.
If you are interested in one of these topics, please don’t hesitate to contact us at info@hpc.cl to provide you with more information.

Our Director, Luis Salinas, is participating in the “Pucón Symposium 2011: Advanced Mathematical Tools for Frontier Astronomy and other Massive Data-driven Sciences” organized by the National Laboratory of High Performance Computing (NHLP). This symposium is being held in Pucón, Región de la Araucanía (9th Region), from 16th to 19th August, 2011.