Our Team
Since 2005 Research Computing (RC) has been engaged in the provision of HPC infrastructure and services not only to TAMUQ and QF researchers, but also to Qatar-based researchers in general. HPC is the employment of parallel processing techniques in computer code running on top of specialized hardware in order to solve complex problems “quickly” and on a scale that commodity computing hardware cannot handle. HPC involves understanding and managing hardware & software that is not commonly employed in regular IT organizations; it requires skillsets and experience that is restricted to a smaller set of practitioners in the labor marketplace when compared to typical enterprise IT skillsets. A successful HPC facility requires the right kind of people arguably even more so than it does expensive hardware.
We believe this team has not only the right amount of technical expertise, but also valuable institutional knowledge of the Qatari educational and research ecosystem built across two decades, as well as an eagerness to contribute to Qatar’s vision of building a knowledge economy. The team has a director who is a successful academic with an internationally recognized research portfolio. It has a senior engineer with 25 years of experience managing HPC infrastructure. It has a junior engineer with over a decade of experience in the corporate world with a leading vendor in the HPC industry. And it has a software developer with over a decade of experience again in the corporate world developing software for the largest consortium of automotive manufacturers in Europe. We are eager to take on new challenges, and to elevate the work of our researchers on a global stage.
Dr. Bouhali received a PhD in Science from the Universite Libre de Bruxelles in 1999. Since 1994, he has participated in the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment program at the Large Hadron Collider Project (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear and Particle Physics (CERN). He was also a member of the fixed target experiment HERMES at the Deutsches Electronen Synchrotron (DESY) and a member of the AMANDA/ICECUBE neutrino telescopes at the South Pole. He has served on many national and international committees. He is a member of the Belgian Grid Computing initiative and supervised the national grid deployment in Morocco.
His main areas of interest are:
- Particle and radiation detectors (medical and non-medical applications)
- High performance and scientific computing
- High energy physics
Faisal Chaudhry has over 24 years of experience administering HPC systems and providing HPC support services to the science and engineering community at Texas A&M University (both in Texas and in Doha). He has managed HPC systems from most of the well-established industry players: from Cray (now HPE) he has experience with the J90 and the XC40, from SGI he has managed the Origin 2000, Origin 3800, Altix 3700, and the XE1300, from IBM he has worked with the Regatta p690, and from Bull the B500. Furthermore, he has been responsible for managing the complete operational life-cycles of three of TAMUQ's past four HPC systems, including assessing available technologies, proposing appropriate system architectures, evaluating solutions, and administering the systems once procured. All operational aspects of keeping the systems running optimally have been within his domain. He also provides consulting on the use of HPC resources and delivers relevant training (Linux, programming environment, workload management, etc.) to the user community.
Irfan Tamboli has over 12 years of HPC experience. He is skilled at designing, deploying and managing HPC clusters, with a focus on HPC storage in particular. He is proficient with SAN and NAS systems and knows parallel file systems such as Lustre and GPFS well. Working for one of the HPC industry’s global storage leaders DataDirect Networks (DDN), he has made significant contributions to the creation and testing of new features for parallel filesystems, as well as to the management and monitoring of HPC storage systems. Part of his experience as a full stack developer with extensive exposure to Java, Python, and Golang, as well as to development frameworks such as Spring Tools and Hibernate also serves his current role well. He performs a wide range of system administration activities but also provides user support and training on the use of the HPC system.
Alan Belferrag brings 10+ years of software development experience from the European automotive industry. He held positions at automotive giants, such as Stellantis, Renault-Nissan, and Hitachi Automotive Systems, where he worked extensively on software control subsystems in modern vehicles. He made significant contributions to the development of software for in-vehicle HPC Control Units. Furthermore, he has also been instrumental in shaping "AUTOSAR", the industry-wide standard that transformed the automotive software development with its unique methodology and architecture.
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