Texas A&M at Qatar celebrates 10 years of High-Performance Computing
Published Feb 25, 2015Texas A&M University at Qatar celebrated the 10th anniversary of High-Performance Computing (HPC), 19 February at the Texas A&M Engineering Building.
Dr. Eyad Masad, executive associate dean at Texas A&M at Qatar, said, “Today, Texas A&M at Qatar is proudly celebrating its third generation of computing clusters as we celebrate 10 years of HPC with great milestones with more than 2 million calculation jobs, more than 20 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. We thank our partners and collaborators across Qatar who have shared in the development of HPC expertise and to Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF), which supports this project that will expand the boundaries of Qatar’s growth and meet the challenges of its engineering and scientific communities.” Masad said.
Othmane Bouhali, research associate professor and director of research computing and director of advanced scientific computing at Texas A&M at Qatar spoke about the importance of HPC and its important role in achieving Qatar’s national research strategy.
Bouhali said, “HPC plays an inevitable role in the nation’s research strategy. The Qatar National Research Strategy has included HPC and computational science as one of its major achievement goals, to enable more complex problems to be tackled and to carry out more extensive and realistic simulations. With the commitment Texas A&M at Qatar has made for the contribution to the development of the State of Qatar, the branch campus has acted proactively and established dedicated programs to promote HPC in the country. It started in 2005 with the acquisition of the first HPC computer cluster, Qatar’s first.
"The branch campus has also helped us create a specialized group of Advanced Scientific Computing experts (TASC) that houses the high performance computing facilities at the university and is a multi-disciplinary group that brings together faculty and researchers to address critical and complex computational challenges. The group also reaches out to international supercomputing and computational centers and establishes ties intended to maximize expertise and utilize emerging tools and techniques to create computational tools, processes and environments that will enable the productive use of developments and applications. This group’s efforts will also help to further establish Qatar as a hub of new knowledge and a contributor to knowledge globally to promote research and address grand challenges in the State of Qatar.”
The event featured speakers from Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) and Qatar Environment and Energy Research Institute (QEER) who talked about their experience with this infrastructure.
Dr. Ahmed Elmagarmid, executive director of QCRI, said, “We are grateful to Texas A&M at Qatar for the leadership role they have played and continues to play in HPC in and outside of Qatar Foundation. Given the ever growing reliance on computation-driven research, QCRI looks forward to working in strong partnership with the university to advance such research in order to address Qatar¹s national priorities.”