Saudi Arabia and IBM to build Middle East's fastest supercomputer
The race to build one of the world’s fastest and most powerful supercomputer is on. And the news this time is from Saudi Arabia. The King Abdullah University for Science and Technology (KAUST) has announced its plans to collaborate with IBM and build the sixth fastest and most powerful commercially available supercomputer. And not surprisingly, the institute has planned to name it after the fastest creature on planet earth – Shaheen (in Arabic) or more commonly known as the Peregrine Falcon. The supercomputer will have a speed of "222 teraflops or 222 trillion floating point operations" per second. For the effort, the computer will become the fastest of its kind in the Middle East. Sourcing its design from a 16-rack Bluegene/P system, Shaheen will feature 65,536 processing cores, each independently functioning in a 3D network
Watch This: As one of the fastest and most powerful supercomputers, Shaheen would perhaps require no marketing. Apparently, the computer can be scaled to include a pentaflop machine as well, thus making it a reliable bet for future demands.
Word around the Web:
Mark Sutton from Itp says:
While there are already a number of supercomputer systems in the region, notably with Aramco in Saudi Arabia, this new system would be by far the most powerful in the Middle East, and the only one in the current top 100 systems worldwide.
Zack Whittaker from ZDnet says:
This is a huge step for the university, but also for the world. Having yet another supercomputer running can help find answers which we never could have considered before.
Via: DNAIndia
