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."

Comments

from TFA

[goose-incarnated]

... will be located at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), a research university that was announced in 2007 and is due to open in a year from now ... "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.

Kind of an odd way to run a research institution - research is all about legacy.

Re:from TFA

[raju1kabir]

Kind of an odd way to run a research institution - research is all about legacy.

Not odd if you've ever been to a Saudi university. They'll spend millions on this so they can say they have it, then it'll just sit there using electricity and being used to play Tetris.

Re:from TFA

[Profane MuthaFucka]

Step up one level. You'll find two princes who both have the same fastest cars in the world, the two fastest race horses in the world, the two largest private jet aircraft in the world, and the largest palaces in the world.

It's just the next competition.
Prince A: "My research lab has 1000 scientists!"
Prince B: "Oh Yea? Well I have 1000 scientists and I'm hiring 10 more next week."
Observer: "What are they working on?"
Prince A&B: "Mine's bigger!"

Re:Simulating...

[Anonymous Coward]

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

At least it does something for secular education

[Animats]

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.

Working in the above mentioned place..

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

[Moraelin]

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