KAUST's IBM Supercomputer is Middle East's Fastest and Most Powerful System

Shaheen System to enable scientific, economic and social advances throughdevelopment and application of high performance computing solutions JEDDAH, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, June 24 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- King AbdullahUniversity of Science and Technology (KAUST) and IBM (NYSE:IBM) today announced thatthe high-performance computing (HPC) system, named Shaheen, has placed 14 among theworld's most powerful supercomputers, according to the latest TOP500 List ofSupercomputers.

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20090416/IBMLOGO ) The foundation of a joint research project launched by KAUST and IBM, Shaheen wasdeveloped to serve the University's scientific researchers across dozens ofdisciplines, advance new innovations in computational sciences, and contribute tothe 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 powerof 185 Teraflops -- or 185 trillion floating point operations -- per second and islocated at the KAUST campus in Thuwal, Saudi Arabia. Shaheen also is designed to beone of the most energy-efficient supercomputers globally, which is consistent withKAUST's high environmental standards.

"Shaheen is the cornerstone of the knowledge-based economy that Saudi Arabia isseeking to develop," said Majid Al-Ghaslan, KAUST's interim Chief InformationOfficer. "The deep computing capabilities Shaheen can deliver will unite the bestof business and scientific computing techniques and will enable us to find the valueburied in growing volumes of data and apply that information to solve real-worldproblems. Through our collaboration with IBM, we are finding it possible to tackleproblems of unbelievable complexity -- things we couldn't dream of doing even a fewyears ago." The research project Shaheen is powering -- known as the KAUST/IBM Center for DeepComputing Research -- will deliver both high-performance computing capabilities tothe a wide range of academic disciplines at KAUST, as well as enable advancedresearch 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 exascalecomputing requirements-- 10 Gbps access to world's academic and research networks.

(C) 2009 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)

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