ISLAMABAD: Federal Minister for Planning, Development and Special Initiatives Ahsan Iqbal inaugurated Centre for Mathematical Sciences (CMS) along with a state-of-the-art High-Performance Computing (HPC) facility at the 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 Centre 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.”
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, Ahsan Iqbal for his vision, support and patronage to help make this dream come true.
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 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 modelling, data analytics, AI, simulations, and other compute-intensive research at national scale.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2025