Source: Mehr News Agency
According to an official with the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology, plans are underway to build a supercomputer in memory of prominent Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani. According to Ehsan Aryanian, manager of IT platforms at ICT Research Institute, initial calls for researching and designing 'Maryam Supercomputer' have been made.
After receiving proposals and assessing them and receiving the required funds, the institute will start building the supercomputer with the cooperation of applicants, he told Mehr News Agency on Sunday.
Maryam supercomputer will be more powerful than the recently unveiled Simorgh, noted Aryanian without providing details of its processing power.
Simorgh Supercomputer was inaugurated in mid-May. Simorgh's current processing power is more than one petaflops (i.e. one thousand million million (1015) floating-point operations per second). Simorgh is said to support businesses with the goal of developing artificial intelligence. It is able to do various tasks including Big Data Analysis, Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things (IoT), and Genetic Data Analysis.
Aryanian also pointed to plans for improving Simorgh supercomputer, hoping that the device could be listed in the Top500 Project after updates.
In 2017, Mirzakhani, the winner of the Fields Medal, also known as the Nobel Prize of mathematics, succumbed to breast cancer at 40. She won a gold medal in the Hong Kong International Mathematical Olympiad, in 1994, to be the first female Iranian student to have snatched a gold medal.
In the 1995 Toronto International Mathematical Olympiad, she became the first Iranian student to win two gold medals. She obtained her BSc in mathematics from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, in 1999. Mirzakhani then moved to the US and finished a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2004.
