the supercomputer, a team of the leading scientists at PAEC developed powerful
computerized electronic codes, acquired powerful high performance computers to design this
system and came up with the first design that was to be manufactured, as part of the atomic
bomb project. However, the most productive and pioneering research was carried out by
physicist M.S. Zubairy at the Institute of Physics of Quaid-e-Azam University. Zubairy
published two important books on Quantum Computers and high-performance computing
throughout his career that are presently taught worldwide. In 1980s and 1990s, the scientific
research and mathematical work on the supercomputers was also carried out by
mathematician Dr. Tasneem Shah at the Kahuta Research Laboratories while trying to solve
additive problems in Computational mathematics and the Statistical physics using the Monte
Carlo method. During the most of the 1990s era, the technological import in supercomputers
were denied to Pakistan, as well as India, due to an arms embargo placed on, as the foreign
powers feared that the imports and enhancement to the supercomputing development was
a dual use of technology and could be used for developing nuclear weapons.
During the Bush administration, in an effort to help US-based companies gain competitive
ground in developing information technology-based markets, the U.S. government eased
regulations that applied to exporting high-performance computers to Pakistan and four other
technologically developing countries. The new regulations allowed these countries to import
supercomputer systems that were capable of processing information at a speed of 190,000
million theoretical operations per second (MTOPS); the previous limit had been 85,000
MTOPS.
The COMSATS Institute of Information Technology (CIIT) has been actively involved in
research in the areas of parallel computing and computer cluster systems. In 2004, CIIT built
a cluster-based supercomputer for research purposes. The project was funded by the Higher
Education Commission of Pakistan. The Linux-based computing cluster, which was tested and
configured for optimization, achieved a performance of 158 GFLOPS per second. The
packaging of the cluster was locally designed.
National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST) in Islamabad has developed the fastest
supercomputing facility in Pakistan till date. The supercomputer, which operates at the
university's Research Centre for Modeling and Simulation (RCMS), was inaugurated in
September 2012. The supercomputer has parallel computation abilities and has a
performance of 132 teraflops per second (i.e. 132 trillion floating point operations per
second), making it the fastest graphics processing unit (GPU) parallel computing system
currently in operation in Pakistan. It has multi-core processors and graphics co-processors,
with an inter-process communication speed of 40 gigabits per second. According to
specifications available of the system, the cluster consists of a "66 NODE supercomputer with
30,992 processor cores, 2 head nodes (16 processor cores), 32 dual quad core computer
nodes (256 processor cores) and 32 Nvidia computing processors. Each processor has 960
processor cores (30,720 processor cores), QDR InfiniBand interconnection and 21.6 TB SAN
storage.”