Supercomputing in Pakistan

Last updated

The high-performance computing cluster, PowerEdge R715, at Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute High Performance Computing Cluster.jpg
The high-performance computing cluster, PowerEdge R715, at Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute

The high performance supercomputing program started in mid-to-late 1980s in Pakistan. [1] Supercomputing is a recent area of Computer science in which Pakistan has made progress, driven in part by the growth of the information technology age in the country. Developing on the ingenious supercomputer program started in 1980s when the deployment of the Cray supercomputers was initially denied. [2]

Contents

The fastest supercomputer currently in use in Pakistan is developed and hosted by the National University of Sciences and Technology at its modeling and simulation research centre. As of November 2012, there are no supercomputers from Pakistan on the Top500 list. [3]

Background

But what about supercomputer exports to India or Pakistan? Will they be used to advance the nations' economies or to speed development of nuclear weapons?

— A passage in Fundamentals of International Business, p. 78 discussing U.S. technological export policy. [4]

The initial interests of Pakistan in the research and development of supercomputing began during the early 1980s, at several high-powered institutions of the country. During this time, senior scientists at the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) were the first to engage in research on high performance computing, while calculating and determining exact values involving fast-neutron calculations. [5]

According to one scientist involved in the development of the supercomputer, a team of the leading scientists at PAEC developed powerful computerized electronic codes, acquired powerful high performance computers to design this system and came up with the first design that was to be manufactured, as part of the atomic bomb project. [5] However, the most productive and pioneering research was carried out by physicist M.S. Zubairy at the Institute of Physics of Quaid-e-Azam University. [6] Zubairy published two important books on Quantum Computers and high-performance computing throughout his career that are presently taught worldwide. [7] In 1980s and 1990s, the scientific research and mathematical work on the supercomputers was also carried out by mathematician Dr. Tasneem Shah at the Kahuta Research Laboratories while trying to solve additive problems in Computational mathematics and the Statistical physics using the Monte Carlo method.[ citation needed ] In 1990s, the Khan Research Laboratories deployed a series of supercomputer systems at its site, becoming nation's one of the first fastest computers at that time. [8] Technological imports in supercomputers were denied to Pakistan, as well as India, due to an arms embargo, as the foreign powers feared that the imports and enhancement to the supercomputing development was a dual use of technology and could be used for developing nuclear weapons in 1990s.

During the Bush administration, in an effort to help US-based companies gain competitive ground in developing information technology-based markets, the U.S. government eased regulations that applied to exporting high-performance computers to Pakistan and four other technologically developing countries. The new regulations allowed these countries to import supercomputer systems that were capable of processing information at a speed of 190,000 million theoretical operations per second (MTOPS); the previous limit had been 85,000 MTOPS. [4]

List of organizations Supercomputers in Pakistan

TOP500 RankSiteNameManufacturerArchitectureYear EstablishedRmax
(TFlop/s)		Rpeak
(TFlop/s)
- National University of Sciences & Technology (NUST), IslamabadN/A HP Cluster (CPU + GPU)2012-132
-Pak-Austria Fachhochschule Institute of Applied Sciences and TechnologyN/AN/ACluster (CPU + GPU)2021-97
- Pakistan Institute of Engineering and Applied Sciences (PIEAS), IslamabadDunamisN/ACluster (CPU + GPU)202050.8
- NED University of Engineering and Technology (NEDUET), KarachiN/AN/AClusterN/A-10
- University of Malakand (UoM), Chakdara N/AN/ACluster2016-N/A
- Riphah International University (Riphah), IslamabadN/A IBM Cluster2016-3.2
- Kohat University of Science and Technology (KUST), KohatN/AN/ACluster (CPU)2008-0.416
- Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology (GIKI), SwabiN/A Dell Cluster (CPU + GPU)2012-0.158
- COMSATS University Islamabad (CUI), IslamabadN/A-Cluster (CPU)20120.158-
- Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), LahoreN/A Huawei Cluster (CPU + GPU)2018-N/A
- Pakistan Institute of Engineering and Applied Sciences (PIEAS), IslamabadN/A SGI MPP (CPU)20110.384-

Supercomputing programs

University of Malakand

Developed Supercomputer in CCMS Department of Physics, University of Malakand. It is heavily used by Graduate Students, PhD Scholars and Faculty Members of UOM as well as Researchers from other organizations. It is operational since 2016 and its performance and configuration can be monitored from the link:

http://hpc.uom.edu.pk

It has 2-servers used as Head Nodes and 24-machines used as Compute Nodes. It has been mostly used for Simulation and Modeling by the Researchers of Materials Science and Chemistry Departments.

GIK Institute

The Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology (GIKI) has nation's notable supercomputer programmes.

This facility has been funded by Directorate of Science and Technology (DoST), Government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan in 2012 under supervision of Dr. Masroor Hussain. [9] This system provides a test bed for shared memory systems, distributed memory systems and Array Processing using OpenMP, MPI-2 and CUDA specifications, respectively. It is a compute-intensive platform and consisted of the following hardware components: [10]

COMSATS

The COMSATS Institute of Information Technology (CIIT) has been actively involved in research in the areas of parallel computing and computer cluster systems. [11] In 2004, CIIT built a cluster-based supercomputer for research purposes. The project was funded by the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan. [11] The Linux-based computing cluster, which was tested and configured for optimization, achieved a performance of 158 GFLOPS. The packaging of the cluster was locally designed. [11]

NUST

The National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST) in Islamabad has developed the fastest supercomputing facility in Pakistan till date. The supercomputer, which operates at the university's Research Centre for Modeling and Simulation (RCMS), was inaugurated in September 2012. [12] The supercomputer has parallel computation abilities and has a performance of 132 teraflops per second (i.e. 132 trillion floating-point operations per second), making it the fastest graphics processing unit (GPU) parallel computing system currently in operation in Pakistan. [12]

It has multi-core processors and graphics co-processors, with an inter-process communication speed of 40 gigabits per second. According to specifications available of the system, the cluster consists of a "66 NODE supercomputer with 30,992 processor cores, 2 head nodes (16 processor cores), 32 dual quad core computer nodes (256 processor cores) and 32 Nvidia computing processors. Each processor has 960 processor cores (30,720 processor cores), QDR InfiniBand interconnection and 21.6 TB SAN storage." [12]

KRL

In 1990s, the Kahuta Research Laboratories (KRL) became nation's first site and a home of a number of the most high-performance supercomputer and parallel computing systems that were installed at the facility by a team of mathematicians. [2] A parallel Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) division was established which specialized in conducting high performance computations on shock waves in the blast effects from the outer surface to the inner core by using the difficult differential equations of the state of the materials under high pressure. [2]

KUST

The Kohat University of Science and Technology installed a supercomputer facility with the specifications of Cluster. [13]

AttributeValue
Cluster NameKUST-Kohat
Number of CPUs104
CPU TypeEM64T
CPU Clock2.00 GHz
Peak Performance416 GFLOPS
OrganizationKohat University
LocationKohat, N-W.F.P, Pakistan.
Last Updated2008-01-21

Riphah International University

On 22 January 2016, Riphah International University based in Islamabad announced that their team of engineers have developed a supercomputer architecture. The system supports CUDA, MPI/LAM, OpenMP, OpenCL and OpenACC programming models. It also can solve larger algorithms, numerical techniques, big data, data mining, bioinformatics and genomics, business intelligence and analytics, climate, and weather and ocean related problems. [14]

UCERD Private Limited

UCERD Private Limited proposed and developed Pakistan's 1st FPGA-Powered Supercomputer. [15] [16]

In 2019, the UCERD team has won HEC Technology Development Fund of Rs. 16 Million [17] for the Project "Development of Scalable Heterogeneous Supercomputing System" [18]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Supercomputer</span> Type of extremely powerful computer

A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS). Since 2017, there have existed supercomputers which can perform over 1017 FLOPS (a hundred quadrillion FLOPS, 100 petaFLOPS or 100 PFLOPS). For comparison, a desktop computer has performance in the range of hundreds of gigaFLOPS (1011) to tens of teraFLOPS (1013). Since November 2017, all of the world's fastest 500 supercomputers run on Linux-based operating systems. Additional research is being conducted in the United States, the European Union, Taiwan, Japan, and China to build faster, more powerful and technologically superior exascale supercomputers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">FLOPS</span> Measure of computer performance

In computing, floating point operations per second is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate measure than measuring instructions per second.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Parallel computing</span> Programming paradigm in which many processes are executed simultaneously

Parallel computing is a type of computation in which many calculations or processes are carried out simultaneously. Large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which can then be solved at the same time. There are several different forms of parallel computing: bit-level, instruction-level, data, and task parallelism. Parallelism has long been employed in high-performance computing, but has gained broader interest due to the physical constraints preventing frequency scaling. As power consumption by computers has become a concern in recent years, parallel computing has become the dominant paradigm in computer architecture, mainly in the form of multi-core processors.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">High-performance computing</span> Computing with supercomputers and clusters

High-performance computing (HPC) uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MareNostrum</span> Supercomputer in the Barcelona Supercomputing Center

MareNostrum is the main supercomputer in the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. It is the most powerful supercomputer in Spain, one of thirteen supercomputers in the Spanish Supercomputing Network and one of the seven supercomputers of the European infrastructure PRACE.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division</span> Provides computing resources for various NASA projects

The NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division is located at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field in the heart of Silicon Valley in Mountain View, California. It has been the major supercomputing and modeling and simulation resource for NASA missions in aerodynamics, space exploration, studies in weather patterns and ocean currents, and space shuttle and aircraft design and development for almost forty years.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre</span> Supercomputing centre at the University of Edinburgh

EPCC, formerly the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre, is a supercomputing centre based at the University of Edinburgh. Since its foundation in 1990, its stated mission has been to accelerate the effective exploitation of novel computing throughout industry, academia and commerce.

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin, United States, is an advanced computing research center that is based on comprehensive advanced computing resources and supports services to researchers in Texas and across the US. The mission of TACC is to enable discoveries that advance science and society through the application of advanced computing technologies. Specializing in high performance computing, scientific visualization, data analysis & storage systems, software, research & development and portal interfaces, TACC deploys and operates advanced computational infrastructure to enable the research activities of faculty, staff, and students of UT Austin. TACC also provides consulting, technical documentation, and training to support researchers who use these resources. TACC staff members conduct research and development in applications and algorithms, computing systems design/architecture, and programming tools and environments.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Irish Centre for High-End Computing</span> National high-performance computing centre in Ireland

The Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC) is the national high-performance computing centre in Ireland. It was established in 2005 and provides supercomputing resources, support, training and related services. ICHEC is involved in education and training, including providing courses for researchers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Computer cluster</span> Set of computers configured in a distributed computing system

A computer cluster is a set of computers that work together so that they can be viewed as a single system. Unlike grid computers, computer clusters have each node set to perform the same task, controlled and scheduled by software.

The National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) is a United States Department of Energy (DOE) Leadership Computing Facility that houses the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a DOE Office of Science User Facility charged with helping researchers solve challenging scientific problems of global interest with a combination of leading high-performance computing (HPC) resources and international expertise in scientific computing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">University of Minnesota Supercomputing Institute</span>

The Minnesota Supercomputing Institute (MSI) in Minneapolis, Minnesota is a core research facility of the University of Minnesota that provides hardware and software resources, as well as technical user support, to faculty and researchers at the university and at other institutions of higher education in Minnesota. MSI is located in Walter Library, on the university's Twin Cities campus.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Supercomputing in Japan</span> Overview of supercomputing in Japan

Japan operates a number of centers for supercomputing which hold world records in speed, with the K computer becoming the world's fastest in June 2011. and Fugaku took the lead in June 2020, and furthered it, as of November 2020, to 3 times faster than number two computer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">National Computer Center for Higher Education (France)</span>

The National Computer Center for Higher Education (CINES), based in Montpellier, is a public institution of French administrative character placed under the supervision of the Ministry of Higher Education and Research (MESR), and created by decree issued in 1999. CINES offers IT services used for public research in France. It is one of the major national centers for computing power supply for research in France.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Supercomputing in Europe</span> Overview of supercomputing in Europe

Several centers for supercomputing exist across Europe, and distributed access to them is coordinated by European initiatives to facilitate high-performance computing. One such initiative, the HPC Europa project, fits within the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA), which was formed in 2002 as a consortium of eleven supercomputing centers from seven European countries. Operating within the CORDIS framework, HPC Europa aims to provide access to supercomputers across Europe.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Supercomputer architecture</span> Aspect of supercomputer

Approaches to supercomputer architecture have taken dramatic turns since the earliest systems were introduced in the 1960s. Early supercomputer architectures pioneered by Seymour Cray relied on compact innovative designs and local parallelism to achieve superior computational peak performance. However, in time the demand for increased computational power ushered in the age of massively parallel systems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Supercomputer operating system</span> Use of Operative System by type of extremely powerful computer

A supercomputer operating system is an operating system intended for supercomputers. Since the end of the 20th century, supercomputer operating systems have undergone major transformations, as fundamental changes have occurred in supercomputer architecture. While early operating systems were custom tailored to each supercomputer to gain speed, the trend has been moving away from in-house operating systems and toward some form of Linux, with it running all the supercomputers on the TOP500 list in November 2017. In 2021, top 10 computers run for instance Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), or some variant of it or other Linux distribution e.g. Ubuntu.

ScREC is a supercomputer developed by the Research Centre for Modeling and Simulation (RCMS) at the National University of Sciences and Technology, Pakistan (NUST) in Islamabad, Pakistan. With a 132 teraflops performance, it is currently the fastest supercomputer in Pakistan.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center</span> High performance computing center in Wyoming, US

The NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC) is a high-performance computing (HPC) and data archival facility located in Cheyenne, Wyoming, that provides advanced computing services to researchers in the Earth system sciences.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cray XC40</span> Supercomputer manufactured by Cray

The Cray XC40 is a massively parallel multiprocessor supercomputer manufactured by Cray. It consists of Intel Haswell Xeon processors, with optional Nvidia Tesla or Intel Xeon Phi accelerators, connected together by Cray's proprietary "Aries" interconnect, stored in air-cooled or liquid-cooled cabinets. The XC series supercomputers are available with the Cray DataWarp applications I/O accelerator technology.

References

  1. ↑ Prasad, Nitin (2016). Comporary Pakistan: Political System, Military and Changing Scenario. New Delhi, India: VIJ Books India, Pvt Ltd. pp. 200 (Chapt. Science in Pakistan). ISBN   978-93-85505-27-0.
  2. 1 2 3 From the memoirs of Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan (8 September 2014). "Part-X". News International, Part X. News International. Retrieved 24 October 2014.
  3. ↑ "Top500 November 2012" . Retrieved 14 February 2013.
  4. 1 2 Fundamentals of International Business. Wessex Publishing. 2008. p. 78. ISBN   978-0979734427.
  5. 1 2 Khan, Feroz Hassan (2012). Eating grass the making of the Pakistan atomic bomb. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. ISBN   978-0804784801.
  6. ↑ Rizvi, Aftab A.; Shakil-Ur-Rehman; Zubairy, M.S. (1988). "Binary Logic by Grating Structure". Journal of Modern Optics. 35 (10): 1591–1594. Bibcode:1988JMOp...35.1591R. doi:10.1080/09500348814551701.
  7. ↑ "M. Suhail Zubairy". Department of Physics and Astronomy. Texas A&M University (TAME). Retrieved 8 October 2012.
  8. ↑ From the Memoirs of Dr. A.Q. Khan (22 September 2014). "Part XII". News International, Part XII. News International. Retrieved 24 October 2014.
  9. ↑ Hussain, Masroor Hussain. "Faculty Profile of Dr. Masroor Hussain".
  10. ↑ Webteam, GIKI. "GIKI IT Facilities". The GIKI Webteam. Retrieved 9 February 2013.
  11. 1 2 3 Ishaq, A Faiz M; Khan, Majid Iqbal. "Supercomputing: A Roadmap for the OIC Member States" (PDF). COMSATS Institute of Information Technology (Islamabad). Retrieved 7 October 2012.
  12. 1 2 3 "Fastest supercomputer is out". Daily Times (Pakistan) . 19 September 2012. Retrieved 7 October 2012.
  13. ↑ "KUST-Kohat Cluster". rocksclusters.org. Retrieved 29 March 2016.
  14. ↑ "Riphah team develops supercomputer architecture". The Nation. 22 January 2016. Retrieved 29 March 2016.
  15. ↑ "Pakistan's 1st FPGA-Powered Supercomputer System Developed by UCERD Private Limited". UCERD.Com. 18 January 2018. Retrieved 18 January 2018.
  16. ↑ Akram, Wasim; Hussain, Tassadaq; Ayguade, Eduard. FPGA and ARM Processor based Supercomputing. 2018 International Conference on Computing, Mathematics and Engineering Technologies – iCoMET 2018. Islamabad: IEEE Xplorer. doi:10.1109/ICOMET.2018.8346363. ISBN   978-1-5386-1370-2.
  17. ↑ "HEC TDF 3rd Call Results". HEC.gov.pk. 15 May 2019. Retrieved 15 May 2019.
  18. ↑ "Development Of A Scalable Heterogeneous Supercomputer". UCERD.Com. 15 May 2019. Retrieved 15 May 2019.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.