Shaheen System to enable scientific, economic and social advances through
development and application of high performance computing solutions
JEDDAH, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, June 24 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- King Abdullah
University of Science and Technology (KAUST) and IBM (NYSE:IBM) today announced that
the high-performance computing (HPC) system, named Shaheen, has placed 14 among the
world's most powerful supercomputers, according to the latest TOP500 List of
Supercomputers.
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The foundation of a joint research project launched by KAUST and IBM, Shaheen was
developed to serve the University's scientific researchers across dozens of
disciplines, advance new innovations in computational sciences, and contribute to
the further development of a knowledge-based economy in Saudi Arabia.
Shaheen is a 16-rack Blue Gene/P System, which performed at a peak processing power
of 185 Teraflops -- or 185 trillion floating point operations -- per second and is
located at the KAUST campus in Thuwal, Saudi Arabia. Shaheen also is designed to be
one of the most energy-efficient supercomputers globally, which is consistent with
KAUST's high environmental standards.
"Shaheen is the cornerstone of the knowledge-based economy that Saudi Arabia is
seeking to develop," said Majid Al-Ghaslan, KAUST's interim Chief Information
Officer. "The deep computing capabilities Shaheen can deliver will unite the best
of business and scientific computing techniques and will enable us to find the value
buried in growing volumes of data and apply that information to solve real-world
problems. Through our collaboration with IBM, we are finding it possible to tackle
problems of unbelievable complexity -- things we couldn't dream of doing even a few
years ago."
The research project Shaheen is powering -- known as the KAUST/IBM Center for Deep
Computing Research -- will deliver both high-performance computing capabilities to
the a wide range of academic disciplines at KAUST, as well as enable advanced
research and innovation in the computational sciences and HPC field.
Shaheen's performance and computing capabilities include:
-- 65,536 independent processing cores.
-- A next generation data center that is able to scale to exascale
computing requirements
-- 10 Gbps access to world's academic and research networks.
