The Arab World Prepares the Exascale Workforce

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The April 2021 Communications of the ACM special section on computing in the Arab world features an article by ECRC Director and KAUST founding dean David Keyes on preparing the exascale workforce.

Keyes muses on the lure of hands-on opportunities to resolve today’s application-architecture tension with innovative algorithms for recruiting students, and he follows the placement of a dozen recent ECRC doctoral students from the MENA region in the US exascale computing project and Saudi industry. 

For them, “graduation” means an upgrade to a more powerful computer :-).  Several have also seen software developed in their theses taken up in commercially distributed scientific libraries and commercial production codes.

By becoming a source of students and a source of software, a university can, in turn, become a destination – a veritable “Mecca” for high performance computing.

The full article is available for download here.