Saudi-based King Abdullah of Science and Technology is reportedly planning on building the most powerful supercomputer in the Middle East.
Together with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), KAUST’s supercomputer Shaheen III will deliver supercomputing and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities for advancing research in fields such as food, water, energy and the environment. Shaheen III ushers in a new era of scientific discovery and AI innovation for the Middle East.
Supercomputing capacity has become increasingly vital to global innovation, industry competitiveness and economic growth. From accelerating vaccine discovery to fight a pandemic, advancing clean energy systems to increase sustainability, to enabling new possibilities in AI, supercomputing is a core technology to solving the world’s most challenging scientific and engineering problems.
Shaheen III, set to be 20 times faster than KAUST’s existing system, will be the most powerful supercomputer in the Middle East to address critical areas that have a societal and environmental impact. Built by HPE, the new Shaheen III system will revolutionise KAUST’s ability to process vast amounts of data at immense speed and scale, enabling its users to unlock discoveries that it could not have before, and realise new potentials for AI.
Shaheen III will be built using the HPE Cray EX supercomputer, a next-generation platform architected to support unprecedented performance and scale, including achieving exaflop speed. The HPE Cray EX supercomputer, which delivers advanced end-to-end capabilities in compute and accelerated compute, networking, storage and software solutions, allows KAUST to apply significant computational power toward modelling and simulating scientific problems faster and with higher accuracy.
Antonio Neri, president and CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, said, “At HPE, our purpose is to advance the way people live and work, and we are honoured to help fuel Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 for a new era of innovation by empowering KAUST with a state-of-the-art supercomputer. Shaheen III will significantly accelerate research at KAUST by applying world-leading supercomputing and AI-at-scale capabilities to increase accuracy in analyses and solve complex scientific questions.”
Dr. Tony F. Chan, president of KAUST adds, “The new HPE Cray EX system will allow us to conduct research on a larger scale, resulting in significant scientific, economic and social advances. In line with Vision 2030, we strive to meet the ever-increasing demands of our active and solutions-driven faculty, and also those of external partners, for faster and more efficient computing resources. KAUST supercomputing resources are used by more than half of our faculty, students, postdoctoral students and researchers, and researchers from more than 20 external organisations in the Kingdom.”
Shaheen III will be fully operational in 2023. The new supercomputer will process unique data sets in focus areas such as clean combustion, Red Sea ecosystems, climate modelling and the Arabian tectonic plate, while delivering analyses, models and simulations at a superior level of resolution.
