Inauguration of High-Performance Computing (HPC) Cluster at SMCS, IBA Karachi

February 11, 2026: The School of Mathematics and Computer Science (SMCS), IBA Karachi, in collaboration with the IT Department, successfully inaugurated its High-Performance Computing (HPC) Cluster, a significant step toward strengthening advanced computing and AI research infrastructure in Pakistan. The ceremony was part of the Government of Sindh’s Industry AI Week celebrations and was attended by faculty members from multiple academic institutions.

The event was honored by the presence of Mr. Muhammad Ali Rashid, Special Assistant to the Chief Minister on IT, as Chief Guest. He appreciated IBA’s leadership in enabling cutting-edge research facilities and fostering academia–government collaboration and assured facilitation and support from the Sindh IT Ministry for scaling the HPC infrastructure and expanding collaborative projects in healthcare, automation, and cybersecurity.

The HPC cluster, an initiative of SMCS, consists of multiple state-of-the-art server machines with over 50 TB storage, 1.5 TB RAM, and extensible 98 GB GPU memory. The facility has already been rigorously tested to support diverse teaching and research needs in text analytics, quantum computing, cybersecurity, computer vision, bioinformatics, big data analytics, wireless sensor networks, and machine learning.

The ceremony also featured a detailed technical presentation by Dr. Tariq Mahmood and Wajeeh Zaidi, who demonstrated the cluster architecture, compute capabilities, and its practical research applications across AI and data-intensive domains.

SMCS acknowledges the vision, facilitation, and leadership of Dr. Shakeel Khoja in making this initiative possible and looks forward to advancing national research capacity through collaborative and impactful technological development.