KAUST's IBM supercomputer is Middle East's fastest and most powerful system

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.