Toubkal HPC in Morocco—Advancing Climate Science and Green Hydrogen Production

Robert Basmajian, head of the Toubkal supercomputer and associate professor at the College of Computing at UM6P, presents Morocco's national-scale HPC resource in the HPC Around the World session. Unlike peer systems, Toubkal was privately funded by the OCP Group with the goal of entering the TOP500 top 100, achieved at its 2021 activation; subsequent upgrades added A100 and later H100 GPUs. The system offers about 71,000 CPU cores, 3.16 petaflops, high-memory nodes up to 1.5 TB, and eight petabytes of storage that is becoming a constraint for climate workloads. A distinctive feature is one megawatt peak of solar power, supplying the machine entirely with renewable energy when the sun shines. Basmajian describes building an HPC culture in Morocco, raising yearly CPU utilization from 8 percent in 2023 to around 30-35 percent through software upgrades, workshops, and user engagement, while the limited GPUs stay nearly fully utilized. Two use cases are highlighted: climate science at the International Water Research Institute, where global climate models are dynamically downscaled from 250 kilometers to three kilometers for flood, wildfire, and agricultural risk prediction, consuming half a million CPU hours and 300 terabytes of storage; and an HPC-accelerated multiscale framework for green hydrogen catalyst discovery combining simulation and convolutional neural networks. Future plans include a letter of intent with four EuroHPC centers toward an AI factory in Morocco and collaborations with Cambridge, ICTP, and the Shaheen supercomputer.