NUST unveils Pakistan’s fastest supercomputer

In an impressive ceremony held on Tuesday at its Research Centre for Modeling and Simulation (RCMS), the National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST) inaugurated its fastest supercomputing facility. The ceremony was presided over by Higher Education Commission Chairman Dr Javaid R Laghari. The state-of-the-art computing facility was recently acquired by NUST through a Ministry of Science and Technology financial grant.
While highlighting the special features of the facility, RCMS Principal Sikandar Hayat said the super computer installed in NUST was the fastest GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) based parallel computing system operating in any organisation or academic institution in Pakistan till date. According to a press release issued by NUST, the supercomputer can perform parallel computation at a peak speed of 132 teraflops or 132 trillion operations per second. It is equipped with multicore processors and graphics co-processors with inter-processor communication speed of 40 Gbps.
Besides its extensive utilisation in the computation-intensive research projects in the areas of fluid dynamics and biosciences, this massively parallel facility can also be utilised to handle huge data processing applications of social sciences such as flood and weather forecasting, oil and gas exploration, energy efficient building designs and transportation management at national-level.
The chief guest appreciated the efforts of the entire team associated with the project and encouraged all institutions to come forward and benefit from the massive computational facility acquired by NUST. He also assured HEC’s full support in this regard.
NUST Rector Engr Muhammad said: “The acquisition of the supercomputing facility would be a source of inspiration for our valued PhD scholars abroad to return to Pakistan.
This will have an impetus on the collaborative research between universities and other research organisations in country and abroad.”
Key note speaker Dr Imran Akhtar gave a highly motivating talk on the occasion. He encouraged young researchers to come forward and exploit the facility at its maximum by using their domain knowledge and expertise in computational science in solving the national challenges in the areas of engineering, bio-informatics, political science, psychology and social sciences.