Slashdot Mirror
Saudi Arabia Begins To Realize Supercomputer Ambitions
An anonymous reader writes "Saudi Arabia is building a supercomputer that could rank among the 10 most powerful systems in the world. And the country isn't stopping there. It has plans to turn this marquee system for the Middle East into a petascale system in two years, and, beyond that, an exascale system."
TFA does not name the O/S it runs, though a linked article from TFA says the Iranian's supercomputer runs Linux.
Inquiring minds want to know, I think.
Kind of an odd way to run a research institution - research is all about legacy.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
What would Muslims need a supercomputer to simulate?
I would think it would be more for the oil industry.
http://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/news/press-releases/two-award-nominations-for-scottish-supercomputer
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,2090687,00.htm
http://www.hpcwire.com/industry/oilandgas/Worlds_10th_Fastest_Supercomputer_Helps_Find_Oil_and_Gas.html
Maybe flight simulator
The software was a big mess: A hospital management system (basically an accounting package) written in FORTRAN!.
It had evolved over decades. It was pretty much unsupportable, but we had the old developers in-house, so they were able to solve the weird bugs usually.
To our surprise, they did not want the regular compiled version with customer support. They just wanted the source code.
We told them that the source code was not for sale. It was also too embarrassing to release.
They then put an enormous amount of money on the table, and promised to keep it in house.
We said OK, and expected a lot of support calls at least for them to compile and install the system.
We never heard from them again. Ever.
Best sale ever.
Maybe IBM has entered into the same kind of deal. Would be great to get a follow up in a few years to see how this computer is being used.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
In some ways, it's encouraging. Until recently, 90% of the advanced degrees awarded in Saudi universities are in "religious studies". Most useful work is done by foreigners, and the country has a 25-30% youth unemployment rate. About four years ago, King Abdullah decided to throw money at the problem. KAUST is part of this. The university is still being built and has no students yet; opening is scheduled for September 2009. It's a graduate school only, and is intended to have about 275 faculty members. Faculty will not be tenured; they'll be contract employees.
Presumably somebody thought that having a big supercomputer would help with recruiting or image. There are no research programs underway yet to use it. The logical application for that would be seismic processing for oil exploration, a classic supercomputer application, but that's moving to GPUs.
Maybe they'll run some simulations to see how that pans out :)
Fnord.
to do alternate energy researches..? ;)
But this is their typical reaction. They buy something expensive, that looks good. Then they let it rot.
A fool and his money ...
When I think about Saudi Arabia though one of the first things that comes to mind is that it's very hot. Building a super computer in a hot country must be quite a challenge from a cooling point of view.
I was wondering was if anyone has considered building a supercomputer in an underground cavern. They are, after all, naturally pretty cool. You would still need cooling to keep it that way but you would be sheilded from the worst of the sun.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
Posting Anonymously for obvious reasons.
Actually this is quite a late realization. They have known that for a fact for the past few years but cared less to get into a competition. The computers are used for Oil reservoir simulation (predicting fluid flow and oil in place, production/injection rates over time), and their simulator is one of the best in the industry besides Schlumberger's "Eclipse", which it's based on scientifically, and is considered to be an industry standard.
They dont only stop there, also "Visualization Clusters" perform parallel graphics rendering (thats what I do actually) due to the enormous amounts of data needed to be displayed on multiple screens. I also know for a fact that there is not a single country in the middle east besides KSA that has such technology (Do not know about Iran, but thats not ME anyway, or is it?)
There are other applications running on SEVERAL clusters.
KAUST which is mentioned in the article is actually overlooked by the national oil company Saudi Aramco (which has all the clusters I am talking about)
P.S. I am not Saudi, but I do have the pleasure to be working with them on this technology, and I am telling you they have some of the best minds on the planet.
Actually, it wasn't a game as such. See, one of the Saudi princes got taunted about his 3DMark scores once too often, by someone with an overclocked compressor-cooled 2x6 core Dual Xeon 7460 system with 3x nVidia GTX 280 SLI.
And as everyone(*) knows, your 3DMark score is not just the measure of your worth, but verily an accurate measure of penis size. In fact, they're in a feedback loop. It's true. If you fall out of the top 10, your Y chromosomes will spread their legs and go, "fuck, we were X all along". And the Penis Police will show up at your door with a rusty hedge scissors and revoke your right to pee standing. It's no laughing matter.
And, well, the royal family represents the whole country and people. The collective penis of the whole Saudi Arabia could be at stake, because someone didn't upgrade their machine to beat the best score. And the last thing you want as a ruling dynasty is to wake up one morning and find a mob of former men in front of the palace gates, wanting to beat you up with their handbags for what junior's lame machine did to them. You really don't want to go down in history as that kind of a ruling family.
So, anyway, it started kinda innocent enough. You know, _quad_ 6-core Xeons, liquid nitrogen cooling, stuff like that. But then they hired a consultant for the rest of the spec and it kinda snowballed from there ;)
(*) ... who wastes their time willy-waving about their system on those boards
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Same as you or me; Jobs. For the most part, the middle east is no different than another country. In fact, I would say it is a LOT like USA. We have LOTS of radicals here. Moral Majority (though mostly gone); Focus on the Family; Timethy McVae; Alamo family down in Texas; The polygamists down in Texas; etc.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.