New technology at UAE University

UAE University's College of Information Technology recently received and installed its first Cell Broadband Engine (Cell BE) — a processor for compute-intensive and broadband rich media applications — under IBM's Shared University Research (SUR) award programme.

SUR is an IBM worldwide programme granted to higher education institutions to promote research areas of mutual value and interest.

The UAE University's College of IT is the first college in the Middle East to receive this award, thus becoming one among 10 universities worldwide to be granted the award.

How it can be used?

The university has received three Cell Broadband Engines and will focus on using the technology to accelerate oil reservoir simulation and seismic applications.

"The engine will allow the university to explore and research the various methods that will enhance a variety of computationally-intensive workloads of the petroleum market including seismic imaging, reservoir modeling and yield optimisation," said Dr Hadef Al Dhahiri, Vice Chancellor of UAE University.

It will mainly facilitate research projects including:

Architecture of business and processes;
Real-time data analysis;
Supply chain management;
Information-based medicine;
Deep computing;
Event-driven computing;
Storage solutions.

New centre on campus

UAE University has also announced that it will establish the first Cell Centre of Competency in the Middle East — C-cube. Due to open on September 1, it is a research and development centre based around the development of applications for the Cell BE processor.

The centre will house application and tool development projects, libraries, research projects, training and workshop events, and will support educational and software enabling efforts.

"This research centre will be very valuable to our university and the UAE, as it will help develop the skills required to programme and optimise the multicore processors of the future," said Al Dhahiri. Students of computer science and computer engineering can avail of the facilities.