By Dyan Delos Reyes, DOST-ASTI Science research specialists at DOST-ASTI check the servers in the CoARE Facility. Photo by Dyan Delos Reyes “High Performance Computing” is a terminology often encountered especially in IT matters, but what does it mean?  It involves the use of a High-performance computer or an HPC, a machine that uses parallel processing to combine computing power for the analysis of huge amounts of data and processing of intensive calculations at high-level speed. In simpler terms, think of your personal computer at home. An HPC is just like it, except that all its processors, memory, and storage capacity has been upgraded a thousand times better in order to achieve higher computational results. An HPC is like multiple computers clustered together in one convenient place. It functions to solve deeply complex problems that could result to breakthroughs in global research and development. The Department of Science and Technology houses one of the first-ever HPCs in the Philippines. Right at the heart of the DOST- Advanced Science and Technology Institute is this jewel called the Computing and Archiving Research Environment Facility, or simply  CoARE Facility. Established in 2014, the CoARE Facility boasts an overall computational power of 3120 cores, storage capacity of 1.5 petabytes, and network speed of 10 gigabytes. The CoARE Facility was conceptualized to meet the growing demand for a facility that could provide stable storage and long-term archiving for datasets used and produced in DOST researches. The facility also put to rest old servers and processors that were not already capable of handling enormous computing power and speed. Funded by the DOST Grants-in-Aid Program, the facility aims to initiate multiple-data integration and collaborations with academic institutions, organizations, and individuals in all fields of scientific domain for the pure purpose of research sharing and advancement. The HPC facility of CoARE provides all the high-computing and data storage needs of its end-users for free. Currently, users of the facility include meteorologists, weather scientists, climate researchers, marine scientists, bioinformatics researchers, genomics scientists, dengue and HIV researchers, data analysts, and students.

High-Performance Computing (HPC) has innovated the technological landscape of data processing, computation, and analysis. The Computing and Archiving Research Environment facility housed in the DOST-ASTI gives researchers and academics access to an HPC

Through the facility, computational processes such as weather monitoring, atmospheric simulations, hazard-mapping and data archiving, among many others, can be done. To be able to extend its services, the CoARE Facility also forged partnerships with research institutions such as the International Rice Research Institute, UP DREAM’s Phil-LiDAR 1, DOST-PAGASA, UP Project NOAH, and UP National Institutes of Health. Research partnerships and data collaboration lead to breakthroughs in knowledge and will also help push for scientific welfare in the Philippines. Services of CoARE CoARE offers various services to clients. Its HPC serves individuals and organizations who need to process large datasets or run highly-intensive applications such as Gaussian programming, NAMD simulation, Weather Research and Forecasting, and Python programming for numerical weather prediction, climate modeling, big data analytics, data modeling and other kinds of research. Meanwhile, the Storage Service is a highly durable storage system and archiving access for environmental data such as that of IRRI, Phil-Lidar, NOAH-WISE, CORVA, and NOAH. It supports the storage of short-term or long-term datasets and can handle large quantity of files, from gigabyte to terabyte sizes. The Data Catalog is an online research repository recently established at the CoARE Facility. Presently, it contains datasets on the landslide and storm surge hazard maps of NOAH-WISE, and quality-controlled meteorological data from the automated weather stations of DOST. Further, this cloud-based service called Science Cloud provides an emulation of physical computer infrastructures called Virtual Machines that could be used remotely. It enables private sharing of data and system access among specific groups, such as PAG-ASA, Phil-LiDAR, and the National Institutes of Health. For queries about the CoAREFacility, please e-mail [email protected]

Did You Know? In order to grasp how powerfully fast and complex an HPC is, let us look at comparisons! The 3,120-core computing power of the CoAREFacility is equivalent to 1,060 units of dual-core laptops working together. Its 1.5 petabytes storage amounts to the data size of 10 billion photos on Facebook, or 19.9 years of high-definition video content. Its 10 gigabyte/s network speed is the same as receiving 120,500 web pages per second, or transferring a full DVD movie in just three seconds.