IBM, Intel open HPC centre in Dubai

A high performance computing (HPC) centre has been opened in Dubai Internet City in a collaboration between global IT giants IBM and Intel.

This is the second such centre IBM and Intel have brought to the region. The first one, based in Abu Dhabi, focuses on HPC only in the oil and gas sector.

HPC enhances the quality of service of business-critical applications, helping improve customer services.

Tom Donnelly, Intel's Director in charge of managing its relationship with IBM in the region, said: "We basically wanted to duplicate what we did in France, which was an HPC competency centre used by local companies to test the performance of particular applications on Intel and IBM equipment. This centre will create a hub for all industries in the Middle East for solving all kinds of business-related problems."

Agreeing with him was Dr Christopher Cooper, Deep Computing Leader at IBM: "Such centre will bring in best practices along with the right environment. The centre will not be targeting any particular industry. Its broad focus will definitely bring growth to the region."

The centre will also be able to serve smaller companies and vendor partners who would be able to afford their own HPC clusters. It will also be able to reach out to different groups and departments in the academia.

"It is important to invest in education and we have had a number of initiatives involving universities and worked on developmental projects in many countries. It is important for the region to evolve and reach the next level," said Cooper.

HPC is not a recent phenomenon, having been used for a number of years to describe the use of a cluster of computers to run extremely performance-intensive applications, delivering answers to complex scientific and mathematical problems in incredibly short times scales.

HPC has impacted today's world in a number of ways, assisting in life sciences, financial services and scientific research, among other disciplines. Traditionally built for academic researchers and vast enterprises, it is rapidly moving into the commercial mainstream. From weather modelling to traffic management, medical research to oilfield mapping, HPC is useful across a broad spectrum of applications.

IBM's high performance computers have overcome some of the most challenging computational tasks facing business, education and scientific communities. In the past such systems were complex and expensive but due to the readily available HPC building blocks and tools, prices have become more competitive.

Apart from the Middle East and France, IBM and Intel have HPC centres in Russia, the US and India.

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