New Texas A&M at Qatar research center aims to advance high-performance computing and scientific visualization
Published Dec 07, 2016
A Texas A&M University at Qatar research initiative in advanced scientific computing 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.
The Advanced Scientific Computing Center brings together faculty and researchers from a wide variety of engineering and science disciplines to tackle complex computational problems, and has been designated an official center of the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (TEES) by the Board of Regents of The Texas A&M University System.
This is the second Texas A&M at Qatar research initiative to be named a TEES center after the TEES Gas and Fuels Research Center was officially established in fall 2014. TEES is an engineering research agency of the State of Texas (USA) and a member of the A&M System.
The TEES Advanced Scientific Computing Center is a partnership between the Texas A&M at Qatar, Texas A&M’s main campus in College Station, Texas (USA), 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 and 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. And in September 2015, Texas A&M at Qatar was accepted as a member of the HPC500, an exclusive community of high-performance computing user organizations. The HPC500 is comprised of the world’s foremost entities that bring high-performance computing technology to bear on challenging problems in science, engineering and business.
“This is a proud day for Texas A&M at Qatar,” said Dr. César O. Malavé, dean of Texas A&M at Qatar. “We are dedicated to contributing to the success of Qatar’s scientific and technical communities, its educators, its scientists and its researchers, and most of all to enriching Qatar’s greatest natural resource — its people. This center has come about because of the hard work of our research computing staff and today we celebrate their success.”
Dr. Othmane Bouhali, research associate professor of physics and director of research computing at Texas A&M at Qatar, will act as center director.
Bouhali said, “The center aims to actively contribute to the implementation of the Qatar National Research Strategy (QNRS) in the field of computational science and its applications such as material science, computational chemistry, medical physics, system biology and high performance computing. Internationally, the group strives to create links with supercomputing and computational science centers. The center is also focusing on further building partnerships with our colleagues at local institutions such as Education city, Hamad bin Khalifa University and others.”