Friday 26th April 2024
Nepal’s Kathmandu University is now equipped with a supercomputer! This is the first time a supercomputer is being installed and operated in Nepal at the Information Technology (IT) Park located between Banepa and Panauti of Kavrepalanchowk district.
The supercomputer will majorly help in the analysis of health and administrative sector’s databases in Nepal.
In June 2018, CERN computing centre donated 200 servers to Kathmandu University (KU) including 184 CPU servers, 16 disk servers, and 12 network switches.
CERN donates equipment that it doesn’t require anymore. Hence, the company has donated a total of 2079 servers, 123 network switches to countries and international organizations including Pakistan, Philippines, Serbia, Senegal, Mexico and now Nepal.
These computing components were used to create the high-performance computing facility for research and education purposes in Nepal.
The supercomputer can be used for analyzing data of earthquakes, climate change, controlling H1N1 virus, genetic diseases, tracking pollution, identifying the hydro-electric potential of various rivers and more.
KU is Nepal’s second largest university but lacking research-specific infrastructure and resources. Following this insufficiency, the KU School of Medicine deletes medical imaging data because due to inadequate disk storage space.
The loss of data makes it difficult to screen diseases or conduct population health studies. Likewise, R&D projects in science and engineering schools rely heavily on foreign resources or online data transfer which is very slow for large amounts of data. With the help of this supercomputer, Nepal will now be able to fill its missing gaps of research and data and deliver quality services in the fields of health, science, and education.
Nepal now has the fastest supercomputer in South Asia, after India!
After its foray into satellite technology, this is Nepal’ second achievement in the technological sector.
