The Supercomputer now in Egypt: A collaborative endeavor between the MCIT and the BA
The Supercomputer project is the outcome of the protocol of collaboration signed between HE, Dr Tarek Kamel, Minister Communication and Information Technology (MCIT), and Dr Ismail Serageldin, Director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA), back in 2006 to outline the joint collaboration between both parties in availing a High Performance Computing cluster (HPC), also known as the Supercomputer, aiming at reinforcing the scientific research development.
Dr Tarek Kamel, has stated that one of the fundamental goals in setting the MCIT strategy is to support the scientific research in Egypt, for the advancement of the information society in Egypt. His Excellency has also confirmed that such a collaboration between the MCIT, the BA, and the various research centers in setting the corner-stone for scientific research methods, gives a blast of creativity and opens new horizons for scientists and researchers.
The MCIT has taken the lead in the bidding process and has set the technical specifications collaboratively with a team from the ICT Department at the BA. Subsequently, both parties have jointly followed up the installation and the pre-operational testing in compliance to quality standards.
Dr Serageldin added that, being a focal point for knowledge and science, the BA aspires to offer a broader scope for research and to provide a wide array of services for scientists and researchers in the region, in accordance to the BA’s mission to be the center of excellence and dissemination of knowledge. Hence, part of the project will focus on building the users’ capacities to maximize the utility of the Supercomputer to the fullest.
The Supercomputer cluster will be deployed for specialized applications that require immense amounts of mathematical calculations. Due to the significant speed of its processors and its storage size that reaches up to 36 Tbytes (36,000 gigabytes), it is considered a valuable tool for researchers seeking optimum, accurate results. Moreover, at peak performance, the Supercomputer can perform up to 11.8 TFLOPS (1012 Floating Point Operations Per Second), owing to the built-in 130 computational nodes (PCs), in addition to the 6 management nodes, which render the Supercomputer a large and fast computational resource for scientists in order to conduct their research at a rate of trillions of calculations per second. Furthermore, the cluster is maintained by a management network as well as a backup system for data restoration.
There are various scientific research domains and applications where using the Supercomputer can make quite a difference, as in bioinformatics, data mining, computer vision, image processing, physics simulation, weather forecast, finite elements, oil and ground water exploration, astro-physics, cloud computing, etc.
It is expected that deploying such a high performance computing cluster in educational research and scientific development, will have a great impact on the scientific progress in Egypt and will open new horizons in the scientific research domain.