Students and teachers at Amir Kabir Industrial University have designed and built the first Iranian supercomputer, containing 32 Pentium III microprocessors working in parallel.
The feat was the culmination of more than ten years’ work by the faculty of electrical engineering in collaboration with the Scientific and Industrial Studies Organization of Iran, according to a report from the Iranian Students’ News Agency (ISNA).
The design of the computer and its software is such that such that up to more than 1,000 microprocessors can be integrated.
The supercomputer, to be launched at the beginning of the academic year, uses state-of-the-art technology and does not require support from other countries or companies. It uses inexpensive and available hardware and software and can be expanded further. Other advantages include easy repair and maintenance, updatability, flexibility in topology for different purposes, on-going processing even in the case of partial glitches and high availability.
Researchers have been using the supercomputer for the instruction of artificially intelligent neural networks and in an experiment to detect Farsi language sounds. Performing these tasks the computer achieved 90 per cent efficiency or that of 28 PCs.