Regional History of High-Performance Computing

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I am interested in investigating the regional history of high-performance computing in Southern Brazil, especially how schools, events, minicourses, and forums helped form technical communities outside the largest national centers.

ERAD-RS is an important source for this kind of investigation because, since 2001, it records themes, institutions, groups, technologies, and problems that circulated in high-performance-computing training in the region.

This line does not treat computing history merely as a chronology of technologies. The main interest is to understand how a technical area organizes itself regionally: who teaches, who learns, which themes appear, which technologies gain space, how student training relates to research, extension, and infrastructure, and how academic communities sustain technical competence over time.

Possible lines of work

• historical mapping of recurring ERAD-RS themes, such as MPI, OpenMP, CUDA, clusters, grids, cloud computing, energy, and concurrent programming;
• study of the regional circulation of minicourses, undergraduate research forums, and graduate forums;
• analysis of the relation between student training, computing infrastructure, and high-performance-computing research;
• construction of timelines and thematic maps on high-performance computing in Rio Grande do Sul and Southern Brazil;
• study of how regional events contribute to democratizing access to technically demanding topics.

Guiding sources

This line starts from the ERAD-RS proceedings and may dialogue with history of computing, computing education, science and technology studies, and public institutional documentation.