TEHRAN (Iran News) – Minister of Communications and Information Technology Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi says the country will name its next homegrown supercomputer after Maryam Mirzakhani, the late Iranian math genius.Azari Jahromi made the remarks in a tweet on Sunday, when the country launched a homegrown supercomputer named “Simorgh”, which is a benevolent, mythical bird of prey in Iranian mythology and literature.
Simorgh’s current processing power is more than one petaflops (i.e. one thousand million million (1015) floating-point operations per second).
This supercomputer will 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.
Jahromi tweeted, in mid-August 2019, promised that Simorgh would be “100 times more powerful than previous ones.”
The name “Simorgh” derives from an ancient Iranian mythological bird, very like the Phoenix in other lore, that is gigantic, universally benevolent, and unilaterally female. This represents an interesting symbol for Iran’s supercomputer—a replete sort of union between the country’s past and its dream for the future.
Iran is making a big play at present to compete in the ever-deepening trenches of global information technology.
In his tweet, the ICT minister vowed that the next supercomputer, whose development began today, will be named “Maryam” in memory of Mirzakhani.
He said the capacity of “Maryam” will be 100 times more than Simorgh.
Maryam Mirzakhani, the internationally-renowned Iranian mathematician and the first female winner of Fields Medal, died of breast cancer in July 2017.
The 40-year-old mathematician, a professor at Stanford University, was the first Iranian woman elected to the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in May 2016, in recognition of her “distinguished and continuing achievement in original research.”
With past honorees, including renowned physicist Albert Einstein, and inventors Thomas Edison, and Alexander Graham Bell, being a member of the organization is considered to be as one of the highest achievements for scientists in the United States.
