The benefit Advanced Artificial Intelligence & Computing Lab
The Benefit Advanced AI and Computing Lab
Vision: “An excellence center and a national resource, inspiring researchers, students, and entrepreneurs in Artificial Intelligence.”
Establishing the Advanced AI Lab was originally inspired by the speech of His Majesty King Hamad, on the significance of artificial intelligence in the digital economy, during the opening of the second session of the fifth legislative term of the Shura and Representative Councils in 2018, for developing a comprehensive national plan to deal with the requirements of the digital economy and employing artificial intelligence techniques in the productive and service sectors. The University of Bahrain is working on introducing and developing academic programs that serve the digital economy through artificial intelligence in line with the needs of the Kingdom, as the graduates of the University of Bahrain excel and lead the digital transformation in the private and government sectors.
Through a distinguished partnership between the University of Bahrain and the Benefit Bahrain Company, which is well known for initiatives employing modern technologies and innovation for developing the Bahraini economy and the financial sector, the company supported the establishment of an advanced laboratory for Artificial Intelligence and computing at the College of Information Technology, University of Bahrain; which will serve many scientific programs and research projects Including:
The PhD in Computing program
- MSc program in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence
- MSc program in Big Data Science and Analytics
- Undergraduate courses in artificial intelligence and parallel processing
- Joint research with CERN and other external partners.
This national project is comprised of multiple compute nodes and fast technology that will be used in parallel to perform machine learning and model training tasks quickly and efficiently. This equipment will be a national resource available to all researchers, students and entrepreneurs in Bahrain, especially working on AI, high performance computing, FinTech, Health Tech, and other technologies that require HPC.
Lab Steering Committee
The Benefit AI Lab is directed by a voluntary broad steering committee which consists of several distinguished members from the IT industry and academic community involved with artificial intelligence and its applications nationally.
The committee works at advancing the Benefit AI Lab vision as well as establishing the agenda for the activities and research conducted within the lab.
The steering committee meets at least twice annually to:
- Review the Benefit AI Lab action plan
- Review the annual report including achivements of the lab
- Suggest the upcoming agenda for research and activities
- Decide the Benefit Research Prize winners
The following are the current members of the lab steering committee.
Hessa Aljunaid (Chair)
College of Information Technology,
University of Bahrain
Zakareya Alkhaja
Electronic Transformation,
Information and e-Government Authority
Yousif AlNefaiei
Business Development & Services,
Benefit
Nezar Maroof
AGM Marketing & Innovation
Benefit
Riad Ksantini
Department of Computer Science,
University of Bahrain
Hesham Al-Ammal
Department of Computer Science,
University of Bahrain
Abdulla Qaddumi
Department of Computer Science,
University of Bahrain
Abdulla Alasaadi
Department of Computer Science,
University of Bahrain
The Benefit AI Lab Committee
The Committee for the benefit Advanced AI Lab is composed of College of IT staff who are responsible for the everyday operation and maintenance of the lab and its activities.
The committee is responsible for:
- Operation and maintenance of lab software stack
- Maintaining lab cluster users
- Manage and monitor research projects being conducted in the lab
- Organize an annual AI Hackathon
- Organize an AI Forum
- Organize and AI Annual Prize
The committee members include:
Hesham Al-Ammal
(Chair)
Abdulla Alqaddumi
(Member)
Abdulla Alasaadi
(Member)
Abdulla Subah
(Member)
Ammar Alsaie
(Member)
Ali Shabani
(Coordinator)
Services
HPC Cluster
The Benefit Lab HPC cluster architecture has the following main components:
- Two master nodes (Dell R640) working in mirrored synchrony (seen by the user as a single master node) in order to avoid having the master node be a single point of failure.
- Eight computer nodes (Dell R640) that each has Nvidia Tesla T4 GPU.
- Two GPU nodes (Dell R7525) with AMD CPUs and two A100 GPUs in each server.
