Industry experts conduct first HPC Center workshop at AUS

The High-Performance Computing (HPC) Center at American University of Sharjah (AUS) held a workshop attended by students and faculty members as well as members of the AUS community. The event was held in the university’s Main Building today, May 6.

The workshop featured eminent speakers from industry and academia deliver lectures on various aspects of HPC and its future. Speaking at the opening session, Dr. Fadi Aloul, Interim Director of High-Performance Computing Center at AUS, and Professor and Head of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, welcomed the delegates and said:

“It gives me great pleasure to welcome you all to the first workshop of HPC Center here at AUS. We have a group of distinguished speakers among us today. HPC is an exciting and dynamic field and it is not every day that one gets the opportunity to listen to and learn from industry experts collected on a single platform.

"Today, universities with in-house HPCs have a competitive edge in producing scientific research in many areas such as engineering, science, mathematics, health, and business. HPCs allow researchers to handle very large data sets and solve complex problems in a few hours or days as opposed to months or years. The four research institutes at AUS will have significant use of the upcoming AUS HPC to solve their research problems," he added.

The workshop comprised five presentations on HPC. These included: “Introduction to High Performance Computing” by Dr. Khaled Elamrawi, President and Co-founder, Brightskies Technologies; “Leveraging the Power of HPC for High Throughput Genomics Analysis” by Nizar Drou, Senior Research Scientist for Bioinformatics, Center for Genomics and System Biology (CGSB), NYU Abu Dhabi; “HPC Introduction and Use Cases” by Ahmad Alabduljabbar, Business Director, High Performance Computing, Middle East and North Africa, Intel; “High Performance Computing and Artificial Intelligence Explained. The HPE Story” by Olivier Blondel, High Performance Computing and Artificial Intelligence Business Development Manager, Middle East and Africa, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise; “HPC Computing: How to Harness the Power of the Machines for your Research” by Dr. Gerassimos Barlas, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, AUS.