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23 Sep, 2008
RIYADH: Unveiling its super computer ambitions, Saudi Arabia has announced it is building a supercomputer that could rank among the 10 most powerful systems in the world. Plans are also in to turn this marquee system for the Middle East into a petascale system in two years, and, beyond that, an exascale system.
This supercomputer, being built by IBM, will be located at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), a research university announced in 2007 that is due to open in a year from now. A data centre that will house the supercomputer will be completed during the summer months next year.
‘The best thing about KAUST is we have no legacy systems and no legacy thinking,’ Majid Al-Ghaslan, the university's interim CIO, told Computerworld.
The system, named Shaheen, Peregrine Falcon, is a 16-rack IBM Blue Gene/P System with 65,536 processor cores delivering 222 Teraflops (222 trillion operations per second.). The value of the project was not disclosed.
IBM estimates that Shaheen will rank about No. 6 in the world when completed, but the university also has plans to quickly add capacity. The data centre it is building will be large enough to hold 500 racks, and although that includes space for storage and other IT equipment, there will be a lot of room to grow.
Development work on the Shaheen at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Laboratory in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., has already started, and the aim is to have the supercomputer ready for the official opening of KAUST in September 2009.
Majid Al-Ghaslan, the university's interim CIO told the local press here the system will be used by researchers for a wide range of computational work in life and physical sciences, as well as in high performance-computing research, to improve the performance of code on systems of this type.
The world's largest system, the Roadrunner, was built by IBM at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It crossed the petascale mark in June, with 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second.
Saudi Arabia is also aiming for petascale, Al-Ghaslan said. And once a petascale system is reached, it will move to exaflop size -- a million trillion, or quntillion, calculations per second.
Asked to explain why the country would need such compute power, Al-Ghaslan said the computing capability would help Saudi Arabia conduct research on its energy supplies. ‘We have some of the largest oil fields, onshore and offshore, in the world,’ he said. These are areas of such size that generate huge numbers that take large amounts of computing capability, he said.
Also, the university also wants to establish itself as an important research center, and Al-Ghaslan said the supercomputer would help attract scientists from around the world. ‘World class scientists expect world-class facilities,’ he said.
One of the more notable supercomputing developments in that region was in Iran, which last year built a high performance computing system using 216 Opteron chips from Advanced Micro Devices. The system wasn't powerful enough to make the Top500 list. Iran has also used Intel chips to build clusters.
Saudi Arabia’s ‘Shaheen’ supercomputer will rival Europe’s fastest computers and should rank in the top ten worldwide, KAUST said in a statement on Tuesday. The system will be comparable to the JUGENE supercomputer, based in Julich, Germany, which is currently ranked as the sixth fastest supercomputer in the world.
Shaheen will also be one of the largest supercomputers in use purely by an academic institution. KAUST, a new graduate-level research university, will use the system for research across its science and engineering units, and also for research into high performance computing. The university aimed to encourage scientific research in the region with the project.
‘When you look at the history [of computing] some of the biggest names out there, like Bill Gates, initially his whole fascination with computing came from access to a supercomputing laboratory in Seattle, so hopefully we can replicate that here,’ Al- Ghaslan said.
‘We really feel confident that this will enable both the research agenda, the regional development agenda and attract the best scientists to KAUST,’ he added.
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