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]
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]
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]
TOP500 Rank | Site | Name | Manufacturer | Architecture | Year Established | Rmax (TFlop/s) | Rpeak (TFlop/s) |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
- | National University of Sciences & Technology (NUST), Islamabad | ScREC | HPE | Cluster (CPU + GPU) | 2012 | - | 132 |
- | Pak-Austria Fachhochschule: Institute of Applied Sciences and Technology, Haripur | - | Lenovo | Cluster (CPU + GPU) | 2021 | - | 97 |
- | Pakistan Institute of Engineering and Applied Sciences (PIEAS), Islamabad | Dunamis | - | Cluster (CPU + GPU) | 2020 | - | 50.8 |
- | NED University of Engineering and Technology (NEDUET), Karachi | - | - | Cluster | - | - | 10 |
- | Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), Lahore | - | Huawei | Cluster (CPU + GPU) | 2018 | - | ~10 |
- | Riphah International University (Riphah), Islamabad | - | IBM | Cluster | 2016 | - | 3.2 |
- | Kohat University of Science and Technology (KUST), Kohat | - | - | Cluster (CPU) | 2008 | - | 0.416 |
- | Pakistan Institute of Engineering and Applied Sciences (PIEAS), Islamabad | - | SGI | MPP (CPU) | 2011 | - | 0.384 |
- | Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology (GIKI), Swabi | - | Dell | Cluster (CPU + GPU) | 2012 | - | 0.158 |
- | COMSATS University Islamabad (CUI), Islamabad | - | - | Cluster (CPU) | 2012 | - | 0.158 |
- | University of Malakand (UoM), Chakdara | - | - | Cluster | 2016 | - | N/A |
- | Khan Research Laboratories, Kahuta | - | IBM | Cluster (CPU + GPU) | 1990 | - | N/A (Classified) |
- | Pakistan Institute of Nuclear Science & Technology, Nilore | - | IBM | Cluster (CPU + GPU) | 1991 | - | N/A (Classified) |
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.
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.
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]
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]
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]
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]
The Kohat University of Science and Technology installed a supercomputer facility with the specifications of Cluster. [13]
Attribute | Value |
---|---|
Cluster Name | KUST-Kohat |
Number of CPUs | 104 |
CPU Type | EM64T |
CPU Clock | 2.00 GHz |
Peak Performance | 416 GFLOPS |
Organization | Kohat University |
Location | Kohat, N-W.F.P, Pakistan. |
Last Updated | 2008-01-21 |
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 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]
A supercomputer is a type of 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 2022, supercomputers have existed which can perform over 1018 FLOPS, so called exascale supercomputers. 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.
Floating point operations per second is a measure of computer performance in computing, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations.
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.
High-performance computing (HPC) uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems.
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.
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 U.S. 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.
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.
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 newest manifestation of cluster computing is cloud computing.
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.
Manycore processors are special kinds of multi-core processors designed for a high degree of parallel processing, containing numerous simpler, independent processor cores. Manycore processors are used extensively in embedded computers and high-performance computing.
Tianhe-I, Tianhe-1, or TH-1 is a supercomputer capable of an Rmax of 2.5 peta FLOPS. Located at the National Supercomputing Center of Tianjin, China, it was the fastest computer in the world from October 2010 to June 2011 and was one of the few petascale supercomputers in the world.
Japan operates a number of centers for supercomputing which hold world records in speed, with the K computer being the world's fastest from June 2011 to June 2012, and Fugaku holding the lead from June 2020 until June 2022.
The National Computer Center for Higher Education, based in Montpellier, is a public institution under the supervision of the Ministry of Higher Education and Research (MESR) created by a decree issued in 1999. CINES offers IT services for public research in France. It is one of the major national centers for computing power supply for research in France.
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.
Yellowstone was the inaugural supercomputer at the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC) in Cheyenne, Wyoming. It was installed, tested, and readied for production in the summer of 2012. The Yellowstone supercomputing cluster was decommissioned on December 31, 2017, being replaced by its successor Cheyenne.
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.
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.
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.
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.