The United Arab Emirates University (UAEU) has deployed Microsoft Windows High Performance Computing (HPC) Server 2008, making it the first academic institution in the Gulf to deploy the technologies for teaching purposes.

The major objective of the collaboration between Microsoft and UAEU is around the development of a lab running Windows HPC Server 2008 for teaching the undergraduate students of the College of Information Technology (CIT), the latest developments in the fields of parallel computing and multi-core processing.

The first student lab has been set up and consists of 20 compute nodes. In its next phase, the university will deploy Windows HPC Server 2008 on 100 servers for conducting computational research. In addition, the lab will be used to train industrial HPC users from sectors such as oil and gas, finance and manufacturing.

'Our collaboration with Microsoft is part of the United Arab Emirates University’s commitment to providing students with the highest levels of technical and professional training programs,” said Dr Eyad Abed, dean of the College of Information Technology at UAEU.

“An important part of that vision is creating an advanced learning environment, by having a powerful technology infrastructure that can be integrated into our curriculum. HPC Server 2008 will provide us with key capabilities that bring benefits to our teaching, learning and research processes.”

Microsoft is also in the process of conducting several training sessions and workshops for CIT faculty members in the areas of parallel computing, multi-core processing, and scientific computing to enable them to deliver courses effectively.

“Windows HPC Server 2008 makes supercomputing more accessible to end users by allowing them to harness computing power through a familiar Windows desktop environment. With Windows HPC Server 2008, Microsoft has made huge advances in performance and scaling that give users a more productive computing environment,” added said Charbel Fakhoury, general manager, Microsoft Gulf.-TradeArabia News Service