Iran's top engineering university was hit by US-Israeli strikes on April 6, severely damaging the institute's data center, as well as labs and other educational facilities.

The Sharif University of Technology's High-Performance Computing Center in Tehran was among the buildings destroyed in the airstrike, which came before a fragile ceasefire was signed this week.

Sharif alumni include the first woman to win the Fields Medal in Mathematics, Maryam Mirzakhani.

Sharif HPC
– Sharif HPC

Given that Iran has long faced sanctions that blocked the sale of cutting-edge semiconductors, the HPC Center fielded a modest fleet of GPUs.

Since 2018, it has operated with "2,500 processing cores (including 4,200 processing threads), 90 GPUs, 15 terabytes of main memory and 560 terabytes of storage space," university documents state.

The facility was used by more than 3,000 registered researchers, and was available to the Shiraz, Yazd, Tabriz, Sahand Tabriz, Birjand, and Shahid Chamran universities. Research papers that cite the supercomputer include Computational insight into networking H-bonds in open and cyclic forms of galactose, Structural and Dynamical Fingerprints of the Anomalous Dielectric Properties of Water Under Confinement, and Locomotion of the C60-based Nanomachines on Graphene Surfaces.

The university's website has been taken offline due to the attack. Xinhua reports that Alireza Zarei, head of the IT Center at Tehran's Sharif University of Technology, continues to teach classes from a room that survived the attack.

The facility was known for its research into AI and computer science, Masoud Tajrishi, president of the university, told the Chinese state-owned publication. "The main reason the enemy targeted this sensitive infrastructure was that they did not want us to gain access to this technology."

Iranian Minister of Science, Research and Technology Hossein Simaei-Sarraf, over the weekend, claimed that more than 30 Iranian universities have been directly attacked by the United States and Israel since the war began in late February. Five university professors and more than 60 students have been killed, he said.

Intentionally attacking civilian infrastructure is generally prohibited under international law.

Last month, US-Israel forces bombed at least two data centers in Iran, potentially in retaliation for Iranian attacks on AWS data centers.

Iran has since again bombed AWS facilities and an SES ground station facility, as well as damaged an Oracle site. It has threatened to attack OpenAI's UAE Stargate project.

After US President Donald Trump on Tuesday warned that "a whole civilization will die tonight," a fragile ceasefire has been brokered between US-Israel and Iran.

Iran plans to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz but will collect fees from ships, which it said would be used to help rebuild bombed infrastructure.

Directly contradicting statements made by Iran and Pakistan, Israel has said that the ceasefire does not cover Lebanon, where it continues to wage a devastating war that has killed more than 1,500 people, many of them civilians (donate to support those impacted here).