The Arab world prepares the exascale workforce

Abstract

THE ARAB WORLD is currently host to eight supercomputers in the Top500 globally, including the current #10 and a former #7. Hardware can become a honeypot for talent attraction—senior talent from abroad, and rising talent from within. Good return on investment from leading-edge hardware motivates forging collaborative ties to global supercomputing leaders, which leads to integration into the global campaigns that supercomputing excels in, such as predicting climate change and developing sustainable energy resources for its mitigation, positing properties of new materials and catalysis by design, repurposing already-certified drugs and discovering new ones, and big data analytics and machine learning applied to science and to society. While the petroleum industry has been the historical motivation for supercomputing in the Arab World with its workloads of seismic imaging and reservoir modeling, the attraction today is universal.