Scientific Capacity Building in Bangladesh

ICTP Junior Associate Abdullah Shams Bin Tariq has received a donation of a high performance computing (HPC) server from Italian company E4 Computer Engineering for his home institute, the University of Rajshahi in Bangladesh. The donation was facilitated by ICTP.

The server, a dual-node, 16-core machine, will serve as a seed for an HPC cluster at the university, and as an attraction for further funds from in-country sources.

The University of Rajshahi is the second largest university in Bangladesh and houses one of the country's top programmes in physics.

"Though clusters may be commonplace in research groups and institutions in many countries, there is no high performance (i.e. parallel) computing facility open to researchers yet anywhere in Bangladesh," explained Bin Tariq, an ICTP Junior Associate since 2001. He added, "Scientists are known to struggle to run curtailed calculations over several days, hampered by power-failures."

To fill this gap, ICTP has been supporting Bin Tariq in his dream to have the first HPC research facility in the country at Rajshahi. The facility will initially be administered by recent Rajshahi alumnus Syed Hasibur Rahman, who has been extensively trained by ICTP and the SISSA eLab.