Dr. Martin and Grace Rosman have long supported Technion students by providing scholarships, funds for student reservists, dormitory housing, and the highly successful Rosman-Atidim Program, which gives disadvantaged youth the chance to attend the Technion. Once again, Technion students are at the forefront of the couple’s vision and generosity as they establish a new computer center for state-of-art supercomputing.
The Rosmans laid the ceremonial cornerstone for the Martin and Grace Druan Rosman Performance Computer Data Center during the Technion Board of Governors meeting in June. “The need for very fast computers is growing exponentially and it is very difficult to catch up in terms of infrastructure,” said Technion President Uri Sivan. “Thanks to you, we will have a new building that will house the finest processors in the world and will provide the Technion, our researchers, and our students with the enormous computing power their R&D requires.”
Many advanced scientific research projects rely on the simulation of natural processes using computers to create, for example, black holes and supernovas in the lab, or to imitate chemical and biological systems for drug discovery and development, explained Professor Ofer Strichman, the Technion’s Deputy for Computing and Information Systems. “This type of computing requires large-dimension parallelism: sometimes, for a single simulation, thousands of computing cores must run continuously for several weeks,” he said. “The Martin and Grace Druan Rosman High Performance Computer Data Center will offer researchers similar computing infrastructure than in the world’s leading universities, and in some regards, even superior.”
“The center will elevate the Technion to an international computing level,” concurred Professor Avigdor Gal of the Faculty of Data and Decision Sciences. “And the new building will give the Technion both physical security and cybersecurity at the highest level.”
As Technion Guardians, the Rosmans, of Annapolis, Md. and Sarasota, Fla., contribute at the highest levels. Mrs. Rosman is a past member of the ATS National Board, and both are current members of the ATS Washington, D.C. Leadership Council and the Technion Board of Governors. The couple received honorary Technion fellowships in 2018, and honorary doctorates at the recent Board of Governors meeting, where some 50 students donning “I am a proud Rosman Atidim Student” t-shirts applauded.
“Our most important mission in the last 15 years has been to support students,” said Dr. Rosman, who has practiced oncology for nearly 50 years. “But we understood that the students also need this computing infrastructure, and this is what the new Center will give them and the Technion’s researchers.” Ms. Rosman, who conducted biochemical research prior to a career as a secondary school science teacher, echoed her husband’s sentiments: “Just to see the students’ success is what’s important to me.”
The establishment of the new center was also made possible through the generous support of the Zuckerman Institute, Gil and Michal Frostig, and other dedicated Technion supporters.