Texas A&M at Qatar hosts global conference on computational science
Published Oct 26, 2017Texas A&M University at Qatar hosted computational science and high-performance computing experts from around the world 23-24 Oct. for the second International Computational Science and Engineering Conference (ICSEC).
The two-day event was co-organized by the TEES Advanced Scientific Computing Center (TASC) in collaboration with the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) and the Qatar Environment and Energy Research Institute (QEERI), and co-sponsored by the Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF).
Texas A&M at Qatar dean Dr. César O. Malavé said, “As an academic institution, Texas A&M at Qatar is proud to partner with industry, government and academic collaborators such as QEERI, QCRI, QNRF and many others to encourage the exchange of knowledge, ideas and expertise that is essential to fuel innovation and new thinking. This conference illustrates the importance of industry, academic and government partnerships in developing scientific solutions that have direct impact on the world around us.”
First held in 2015 in Doha, ICSEC brings together researchers, experts and stakeholders to discuss recent research topics in computational science and its role in tackling the most complex problems locally and globally. The technical program featured more than 80 talks in a variety of areas, including computational science applications in oil and gas, biology and medicine, the electric grid and solar photovoltaic technologies, and advanced materials.
Keynote speakers were Professor Kenneth M. Merz from Michigan State University (USA) and Professor Dimitrios Maroudas from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (USA). Other presenters represent leading institutions in North America, Europe and Asia.
Conference chair Dr. Othmane Bouhali said, “This conference was another opportunity to bring top experts to Qatar to share ideas and work with local experts and scientists. Students were also encouraged to present their papers and posters, and to interact with these global experts.” Bouhali is also TASC director and a research professor of physics at Texas A&M at Qatar.
All selected papers will be published in a special issue of the Journal of Computational Science.
Texas A&M at Qatar launched officially TASC in December 2016 as the second Doha-based research center of the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (TEES), a research agency of the State of Texas and a member of The Texas A&M University System. TASC aims to become a regional and global leader in scientific computing by developing innovative solutions and using state-of-the-art computational tools to address computational challenges in science, engineering and industry.
TASC brings together faculty and researchers from a wide variety of engineering and science disciplines and is a partnership between the Texas A&M at Qatar, Texas A&M’s main campus and TEES. Areas of interest for the center are high-performance computing, computational material sciences and chemistry, computational physics and biology and 3-D scientific visualization.
Texas A&M at Qatar is at the vanguard of high-performance computing (HPC). In February 2015, the branch campus celebrated 10 years of HPC. At the time, the branch campus’s research computing group headed by Bouhali marked several milestones, including more than five million calculation jobs, more than 30 million CPU hours execution time, and more than 100 scientists and researchers across the country using the HPC resources and benefitting from the research computing skills of Texas A&M at Qatar experts. In September 2015, Texas A&M at Qatar was accepted as a member of the HPC500, an exclusive community comprising the world’s foremost entities that bring high-performance computing technology to bear on challenging problems in science, engineering and business.