GOVERNMENT

QATAR Foundation’s Education City is to get its second supercomputing system from the efforts of Texas A&M University at Qatar (TAMUQ) which installed the first last September. Please see related article at www.supercomputingonline.com/article.php?sid=9402 . "The proposed, large shared memory supercomputer, will complement what we have here and triple the amount of actual computing resources we have," TAMUQ’s chief information officer Dr Timothy Chester said. The first supercomputing cluster, named ‘Supercomputing Applications in Qatar for Research’ (SAQR), harnesses the speed and power of over 200 processors. It was developed for faculty and industry researchers to run complex engineering applications, such as oil field mapping, in just hours instead of days or weeks. "Both the supercomputers will be under the banner of SAQR," Chester explained while pointing out that TAMUQ is working with QF, research partners and Qatar Science & Technology Park to deploy the second supercomputer. The proposed supercomputer is to be installed in, and the first one shifted to, TAMUQ’s state-of-the-art Engineering Building, scheduled to be ready in 2007, within Education City. "We anticipate having access to portions of that building in March 2007 and do the full moving, over the course of summer, and we will have a lot more space," he observed. Since SAQR’s inception, there have been about 40 active users, including faculty at TAMUQ, its home campus in College Station, Texas, US, and several faculty members in a research group in Europe with the Institute of Physics in Serbia. "If you look at our statistics, we have had about 10,000 programming jobs submitted, and the system is utilized right now at the rate of 98%," the official said. Based on the response from TAMUQ faculty and researchers who have been working with the project, SAQR is very successful, Chester said. Asked if SAQR has been used by the local industry, the official said TAMUQ did not really have a chance in that direction. "I think this year is the time for us to reach deeper that way, and we are continuing our discussions with Qatar Petroleum," he said. TAMUQ’s new building will also have what is known as a complete scientific visualization facility that will allow TAMUQ’s researchers and teaching faculty to do simulations.