23 February 2015
Doha - Texas A&M University at Qatar celebrated the 10th anniversary of High Performance Computing (HPC), 19 February at Texas A&M Engineering Building at Education city.

Eyad Masad, Executive Associate Dean at Texas A&M University at Qatar, said, "Today, Texas A&M at Qatar is proudly celebrating its third generation of computing clusters as we celebrate 10 years of HPC with great milestones with more than 2 million calculation jobs, more than 20 million CPU hours execution time and more than 100 scientists and researchers across the country using the HPC resources and benefitting from the research computing skills of Texas A&M at Qatar experts,"

"We thank our partners and collaborators across Qatar who have shared in the development of HPC expertise and to Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF) which supports this project that will expand the boundaries of Qatar's growth and meet the challenges of its engineering and scientific communities." Masad said.

Othmane Bouhali, research associate professor and director of research computing and director of advanced scientific computing at Texas A&M at Qatar spoke about the importance of HPC and its important role in achieving Qatar's national research strategy, saying, "HPC plays an inevitable role in the nation's research strategy. The Qatar National Research Strategy has included HPC and computational science as one of its major achievement goals, to enable more complex problems to be tackled and to carry out more extensive and realistic simulations,".

"With the commitment Texas A&M at Qatar has made for the contribution to the development of the State of Qatar, the branch campus has acted proactively and established dedicated programs to promote HPC in the country. It started in 2005 with the acquisition of the first HPC computer cluster, Qatar's first."

"The branch campus has also helped us create a specialized group of Advanced Scientific Computing experts, TASC, that houses the high performance computing facilities at the university and is a multi-disciplinary group that brings together faculty and researchers to address critical and complex computational challenges.the group also reaches out to international supercomputing and computational centers and establishes ties intended to maximize expertise and utilize emerging tools and techniques to create computational tools, processes and environments that will enable the productive use of developments and applications that exceed state-of-the-artthese networks and collaborations help develop a better understanding of complex systems and provide a home for the sharing of knowledge and a forum for exploration in this ever-emerging and essential field this group's efforts will also help to further establish Qatar as a hub of new knowledge and a contributor to knowledge globally to promote research and address grand challenges in the State of Qatar."

The event featured speakers from partners such as QCRI and QEER who talked about their experience with this infrastructure.

Dr. Ahmed Elmagarmid, executive director of QCRI, said, "We are grateful to Texas A&M at Qatar for the leadership role they have played andcontinues to play in HPC in and outside of Qatar Foundation. Given theever growing reliance on computation-driven research, QCRI looks forwardto working in strong partnership with the university to advance such research inorder to address Qatar¹s national priorities."

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About Texas A&M University at Qatar
Texas A&M University, recognized as having one of the premier engineering programs in the world, has offered undergraduate degrees in chemical engineering, electrical and computer engineering, mechanical engineering and petroleum engineering at Qatar Foundation's Education City campus since 2003, and graduate degrees in chemical engineering since fall 2011. More than 500 engineers have graduated from Texas A&M at Qatar since 2007. In addition to engineering courses, Texas A&M at Qatar provides classes in science, mathematics, liberal arts and the humanities. All four of the engineering programs offered at Texas A&M at Qatar are accredited by the Engineering Accreditation Commission of ABET. The curricula offered at Texas A&M at Qatar are materially the same as those offered at the main campus in College Station, Texas, and the courses in Doha are taught in English in a co-educational setting. The reputation for excellence is the same, as is the commitment to equip engineers to lead the next generation of engineering advancement. Faculty from around the world are attracted to Texas A&M at Qatar to provide this educational experience and to participate in research activities now valued at more than $196 million, and that address issues important to the State of Qatar.

Visit www.qatar.tamu.edu.

For information contact:
Nehal Maher
Texas A&M University at Qatar
Nehal.maher@qatar.tamu.edu
+974.4423.0540
+974.5542.8289

© Press Release 2015