Doha, Qatar — On the eastern coast of Saudi Arabia, education — and the technology that supports it — has taken center stage. The small country of Qatar is now home to Education City, a multi-institutional campus that boasts faculty and curricula from five of America’s leading universities, including Texas A&M University. To support the research and computational needs of Texas A&M’s engineering students, the school’s information technology team has created a new supercomputer comprised of Xserve G5 nodes and Xserve RAID shared storage. Combined with a second cluster operating on Texas A&M’s College Station campus, the Qatar supercomputer is now one of the most powerful systems of its kind in the world.
The undergraduate degree programs offered by Texas A&M University at Qatar — in petroleum, chemical, electrical, and mechanical engineering — are identical to those offered on the main Texas A&M campus in College Station, Texas. Faculty members who are appointed to the Qatar campus for one- to three-year terms teach all courses, while the student body is composed of Qatari citizens and international visitors.
Xserve G5 Nodes: Ideal for Researchers
In the chemical engineering courses, students routinely conduct research on the properties and transformation of chemicals. Their projects include the virtual creation of molecules, and the construction of electronic circuits via computer. Given the massive calculations necessary to support these efforts, Texas A&M-Qatar clearly needs computational muscle. That’s why Tim Chester, chief information officer (CIO) at Texas A&M-Qatar, turned to Apple for help.
“We’d seen some pretty good proofs of concept from Virginia Tech and some private research centers, all of whom were using Apple systems,” explains Chester. “Texas A&M also has a genomics team that put together a similar system, and they’d had quite a bit of success with that. After doing our own research, the Mac seemed like the way to go.”
“The Mac gave us much more bang for the buck,” adds Dr. Ken Hall, chair of Texas A&M’s chemical engineering department. “Our decision to go with Apple really boiled down to the fact that the Mac was a more economical purchase, plus the G5 processor was faster on floating point calculations than competitive processors. A big advantage over other platforms, of course, is that you can do all of your debugging on your laptop and then just transfer it to the cluster, because it’s the same operating system. That was a huge benefit for us.”
