Digital
Pakistan Lab

The goal of the Digital Pakistan Lab is to create a platform where multiple tools will be developed for multiple domains involving both commercial and non-commercial entities so that they can use these services effectively. Our scientific goal is to create innovation ecosystem based on applied R&D network of partners in government, industry, and academia. The hardest problem is the user’s commitment to digitize, lack of customized data analytics platform specific for national needs, ensuring security and secrecy of data. The lab will work to overcome these issues in Pakistan and will set a course for other initiatives as well to achieve the objectives of Vision 2025. The architecture will be realized by implementing a broker architectural pattern for distributed application. The purpose of broker architecture is to build a system as a set of decoupled interacting components to achieve flexibility, location transparency, maintainability, and scalability.

We propose to implement broker pattern in a way that clients see a single logical system which physically runs on various geographically separated platforms. Clients are registered and can use hardware or software services. Hardware services include high performance computing and storage resources through broker component. Broker component selects the target hardware platform whenever a client requests for a computing resource and forwards client’s request to that selected platform. Similarly, broker decides location of the physical storage on a client’s storage request. In order to use software services, clients can use any of the following three options

• Web Services: Logic runs on clusters, data uploaded by clients to get their results
• Dynamic Link Libraries (DLLs): Logic is downloaded by clients and they can embed that in their own source codes
• Mobile Agents: Executable agents execute on client computers without any data migration to perform data analytics

This would allow the users across domains to securely use the published tools without any fear of data loss to adversaries. Lab shall provide data analytics and computing services across three domains:

1. Industry 4.0
2. Health Care
3. Energy

Three types services will be provided:

• HPC and storage resources through a broker architecture
• Generic data analytics algorithms utilizing HPC
• Domain specific data analytic algorithms

Any HPC and storage resources in public domain can be made part of the framework for effective utilization. This feature is extremely important since public funded clusters often remain offline or are not being optimally utilized.

Our core R&D objectives will be:

• Analytics: The lab will turn numbers into knowledge that informs and empowers.
• Decision sciences: In the digital economy, data with the science of decision making needs to work together.
• Software and computational systems: Develop trustworthy software to help make sense of data and enable safe sharing.
• Engineering and user experience design: To building novel technology through design process involving high performance computations thus making impact through innovation