Status Report from KAUST in Saudi Arabia
Thursday, July 1, 2021 12:20 PM to 12:30 PM · 10 min. (Africa/Abidjan)
Stream#4
Information
Contributors:
Abstract:
The Arab World is currently host to four computers in the top 100 globally, including the current #10 and a former #7. Good return on investment from leading-edge hardware motivates forging collaborative ties to global supercomputing leaders, which leads to integration into the global campaigns that supercomputing excels in, such as predicting climate change and developing sustainable energy resources for its mitigation, positing properties of new materials and catalysis by design, repurposing already certified drugs and discovering new ones, and big data analytics and machine learning applied to science and to society. While the petroleum industry has been the historical motivation for supercomputing in the Arab World, with its workloads of seismic imaging and reservoir modeling, the attraction today is full-orbed.
As part of their inauguration into research, each student is presented with a list of “universals” for exascale computing. The list has been growing over the past few years to include: 5 architectural imperatives, 5 strategies already widely in practice, and 5 strategies in progress. Each is asked to identify a research contribution among these “universals” and to adopt a particular demanding application to keep the work practically motivated, typically through a co-advisor. From our experience with this cadre of students, we advocate the following five principles for equipping the next generation exascale workforce. We claim herein that a menu of: Awareness, Examples, Instruction, Opportunity, and Utilization will Yield members of the exascale workforce, mnemonically: A, E, I, O, U and sometimes – hopefully often(!) – Y.
Abstract:
The Arab World is currently host to four computers in the top 100 globally, including the current #10 and a former #7. Good return on investment from leading-edge hardware motivates forging collaborative ties to global supercomputing leaders, which leads to integration into the global campaigns that supercomputing excels in, such as predicting climate change and developing sustainable energy resources for its mitigation, positing properties of new materials and catalysis by design, repurposing already certified drugs and discovering new ones, and big data analytics and machine learning applied to science and to society. While the petroleum industry has been the historical motivation for supercomputing in the Arab World, with its workloads of seismic imaging and reservoir modeling, the attraction today is full-orbed.
As part of their inauguration into research, each student is presented with a list of “universals” for exascale computing. The list has been growing over the past few years to include: 5 architectural imperatives, 5 strategies already widely in practice, and 5 strategies in progress. Each is asked to identify a research contribution among these “universals” and to adopt a particular demanding application to keep the work practically motivated, typically through a co-advisor. From our experience with this cadre of students, we advocate the following five principles for equipping the next generation exascale workforce. We claim herein that a menu of: Awareness, Examples, Instruction, Opportunity, and Utilization will Yield members of the exascale workforce, mnemonically: A, E, I, O, U and sometimes – hopefully often(!) – Y.
