Dr. Nazif Launches the Supercomputer at the BA
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Alexandria—Egyptian Prime Minister, Dr. Ahmed Nazif, launched on Thursday, 30 July 2009, the supercomputer, a new initiative to promote scientific research in Egypt and the Middle East. The Launching was attended by Dr. Tarek Kamel, Minister of Information and Communication Technology (ICT); Dr. Ismail Serageldin, Director of the Library of Alexandria, in addition to several officials and IT specialists.
Dr. Kamel stated that the Ministry of ICT supports all efforts of scientific research and technological development to upgrade the Egyptian information society.
Dr. Serageldin mentioned that the supercomputer is a result of a Memorandum of Understanding signed between the BA and the Ministry of ICT in 2006. The supercomputer, which is expected to enhance scientific research in Egypt and Middle East, also comes within the BA’s mission to become a leading institution of the digital age.
Serageldin pointed out that the BA is keen on opening new horizons in scientific research for scientists and researchers in different fields. He added that the supercomputer project will also provide training for users, so that they can fully utilize its features. Targeted users will include researchers from Egyptian universities and research institutions.
It is worth mentioning that the supercomputer, because of its vast speed (11.8 TFLOPS)and enormous storage size (36,000 gigabytes), is used in applications that require complicated mathematical operations. These features will enable researchers to perform up to thousands of billions of operations in one second.
The supercomputer is used in different applications such as: bioinformatics, data mining, computer vision, image processing, physics simulation, weather forecast, oil and ground water exploration, astrophysics, cloud computing, and many others.