Federal Minister for Planning, Development and Special Initiatives, Prof. Ahsan Iqbal inaugurated Center for Mathematical Sciences (CMS) along with a state-of-the-art High-Performance Computing (HPC) facility at Pakistan Institute of Engineering and Applied Sciences (PIEAS) here on Tuesday.
Chairman PAEC Dr. Raja Ali Raza Anwar accompanied the minister during the inauguration and showed him various CMS laboratories.
Talking to media persons on this occasion, Prof. Ahsan Iqbal said, “I am very excited to inaugurate the Center for Mathematical Sciences and HPC facility at PIEAS and I would like to congratulate both PIEAS and PAEC for this achievement. It is high time that we start initiatives which serve to improve the stature of our dear motherland rather than prioritising individual impact factors. Universities should focus on introducing such research programmes which help convert the country’s economy into a technology-based economy.”
The CMS and HPC facilities were approved in 2017 under the Vision 2025, he added.
Prof Ahsan Iqbal further said that successful nations are those that gain high levels of knowledge and technology and this advancement adds to the URAAN Pakistan initiative to have the best research and development facilities in Pakistan.
Chairman PAEC thanked the Federal Minister, Prof Ahsan Iqbal for his vision, support and patronage to help make this dream come true.
The Center for Mathematical Sciences (CMS) at PIEAS was approved through the Higher Education Commission (HEC) by the special interest of Prof Ahsan Iqbal back in 2017, during his previous tenure as Federal Minister for Planning and Development.
Major facilities developed under the project included the HPC facility and eight other high-tech specialized laboratories related to Applied Mathematical Sciences and Computational Mathematics. A dedicated Academic Block and a Researchers Hostel have also been developed under this project. The HPC facility developed in the project would serve to bring Pakistan and its universities at par with the infrastructure required for High Performance Computing needed to carry out cutting-edge Mathematical and Applied Research. The long-term benefit of the project is the production of highly trained personnel leading towards technological self-reliance.
With a consistent support from Prof Ahsan Iqbal, PIEAS has recently commissioned the Al-Khwarizmi HPC Cluster, the most powerful CPU-based computational facility in Pakistan to date.
With a peak performance of 350 TFLOPs, the system includes 58 compute nodes (48 standard and 10 large-memory), 5,104 CPU cores, 40 TB of RAM, and 2 petabyte (2048 TB) of storage, all interconnected via InfiniBand NDR at 200 Gbps. This infrastructure enables scientific modeling, data analytics, AI, simulations, and other compute-intensive research at national scale.
The cluster will serve universities, research institutions, and industry across Pakistan, reducing dependence on overseas facilities and empowering local researchers to address critical national challenges – from climate science and energy to genomics and AI.
Access will be granted through a proposal-based system, with training and support offered to new users. This facility would run in integration with the HPCs being developed by HEC. The facility represents a game-changing resource for advancing Pakistan’s innovation and research ecosystem.
PIEAS is the leading Engineering University of the country working under the aegis of Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission. Established as a ‘Reactor School’ in 1967, PIEAS gained the status of degree awarding institute in 2000.