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Aiming to establish a regulatory framework with respect to cooperation mechanisms between the Latin American Cooperation of Advanced Networks (RedCLARA) and the Ibero-American Network of High Performance Computing (RICAP), both institutions signed, on December 11, 2017, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in which commit, among other actions, to exchange and promote its experiences and best practices, provide and carry out joint training and teaching activities, and integrate its cloud computing platforms into a single infrastructure.

Luis Eliécer Cadenas, Executive Director of RedCLARA, and Rafael Mayo, Coordinator of RICAP, are the signatories of the agreement, valid until the end of the year 2020.

Based in Madrid, Spain, RICAP is a thematic network that provides to the region a strategic infrastructure in the field of high performance computing from an advanced architecture that includes High Performance Computing (HPC) and High Productivity (HTC). For this, it brings together several organizations and develops different software tools designed to facilitate the access and the computational efficiency of this hardware infrastructure, encouraging free use through various dissemination actions.

The agreement with RedCLARA is another step in that direction, given that it also seeks to increase awareness and information on the activities of each network by its members, as well as by potential users and those responsible for making decisions within the respective beneficiary communities. "The importance of the MoU is really vital given that, without RedCLARA, the scope and impact that RICAP could have would be much more limited. Thanks to all the activities that RedCLARA regularly carries out, RICAP will be promoted and will be able to fulfill its commitments more effectively. Likewise, RedCLARA will benefit from the fact that it will provide its associates with a much greater computing capacity", celebrates Rafael Mayo.

For Luis Eliécer Cadenas, the MoU between RedCLARA and RICAP is promoting a way of acting that is key for the academic community in the region. "Sharing the invested resources, generally scarce, promoting local or regional initiatives so that the entire community has access to it, gives a value to the cooperative effort that goes beyond pure connectivity," he analyzes. The Director also explains what the next steps of the initiative will be: "We will define, together, a work plan that includes online training and the structure of the technical methods required for members of any academic network in Latin America, in order to allow them to use these resources with security guarantee".

The MoU does not imply any type of binding legal obligation and may be renewed automatically for 39 months at the end. To obtain more information about the Memorandum of Understanding and its resolutions, download the document in PDF. The agreement with RICAP is the third of the type signed by RedCLARA in the last months. In September 2017, the regional network signed a MoU with the Bolivian chapter of Internet Society for the development of Bolivia's advanced national network and its subsequent integration into the regional network, and in December the agreement with SOS Telemedicina, of Venezuela, was announced, to extend and develop initiatives in the area.