A High Performance Computing (HPC) Seminar Series was held at American University of Sharjah (AUS) yesterday, April 16. The series, held at AUS for the first time, included three workshops on an Introduction to High Performance Computing (HPCs) for senior management; for faculty, researchers and students; and for IT staff.

The workshops were presented by Dr. Muataz Al-Barwani, Director of the High Performance and Research Computing Center in NYU Abu Dhabi; Benoit Marchand, Senior Computational Scientist at the High Performance and Research Computing Center in NYU Abu Dhabi; and Dr. Dureid El Moghraby, Research Computing Manager in Masdar Institute.

The first workshop, which was held for senior management in the Board Room, was conducted by Dr. Al-Barwani and was attended by Dr. Björn Kjerfve, AUS Chancellor; Dr. Jeannette Vinke, Interim Chief Operating Officer; Dr. Leland Blank, Interim Provost and Chief Academic Officer; as well as AUS deans and other senior officials.

According to Dr. Björn Kjerfve, "AUS is now considering an investment in an HPC to help empower its faculty and to help attract top researchers around the world. This will further our mission in putting AUS on the map as one of the top research universities worldwide."

The workshop that followed for faculty, researchers and students explained the uses of HPC, parallel and throughput computing, examples of HPC research applications, moving applications and codes to the HPC, managing the data lifecycle, and HPC user training.

Later in the day, the technical team workshop for IT staff discussed HPC technologies, gathering the requirements (computational and infrastructure), building an RFP and the procurement process, installing, provisioning and managing an HPC cluster, supporting the operation of a HPC system, and HPC training of users and IT specialists.

Dr. Fadi Ahmed Aloul, head of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and organizer of the event, said, "Research universities today are known to have facilities to help empower researchers and one of these is High Performance Computing. The presence of HPC will not only attract top faculty, graduate and doctoral students, but it will help raise our university ranking by increasing research productivity and publications."