- Saturday, 11 July 2009
- INQ Mobile
- RSS
The Itanium is an architecture that will be around for the next 20 years
Saudi supercomputer tips up
SAUDI ARABIA HAS ITS eye set on exascale supercomputing and is building a machine which could soon rank amongst the top 10 supercomputers in the world.
The country says it will start with a petascale system, which should be ready within two years and expand from there.
The Middle East is generally known more for its massive oil reserves than its technological prowess, but Saudi Arabia – like the UAE – realises its liquid black gold may not last forever and is now looking to pump cash into new industries.
Saudi’s supercomputer, which will reside at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), is being nailed together by IBM, makers of the world’s number one supercomputer, the Roadrunner. IBM is building it in its US TJ Watson Research Laboratory, but plans to have it in Saudi by next year.
Using the Arabic word for Peregrine Falcon, the IBM Blue Gene/P System superdupercomputer will be dubbed Shaheen and will boast 16 racks and 65,536 processor cores, providing 222 Teraflops.
That kind of power should put Shaheen at No. six on the world’s most super supercomputers list, but the Saudis are already looking to better that, boasting that the current data centre in KAUST has capacity for 500 racks and can be expanded if necessary.
Talking to Computerworld, Majid Al-Ghaslan the university's Chief Information Officer noted "The best thing about KAUST is we have no legacy systems and no legacy thinking".
As to why Saudi would need such massive computing capabilities, Al-Ghaslan noted that a computer of such caliber would surely attract the best academic minds world-over to study and carry out research in Saudi.
Al-Ghaslan also noted Shaheen could be used to number crunch just exactly how much longer Saudi could remain dependent on oil before it had to find alternative energy solutions.
We wonder if that could be called data mining then? µ
L'Inq
ComputerWorld
Share this:
Business Intelligence Software
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Enterprise Accounting Software
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
Enterprise Systems Management
The article doesn't mention which processors make up the bulk of the 65K installed. Knowing it's IBM, one can guess it would be some version of it's PowerPC chips. 

Now I've read numerous articles showcasing the difference GPU's can make towards computing. For example I recall a Medical imaging computer that went from a $16000 8 cpu system, to a $4000 quad GPU system that outperformed it significantly. There were also the dedicated hardware AEGIA physX chips. 

The question is, which company is going to 'blend' them all together into a supercomputer whose performance is significantly higher then just using the poor CPUs by themselves....?
What are they going to do with it until all those scientists flood in to use it? Maybe they could run SETI @ Home.
"We wonder if that could be called data mining then?" 

:-) It is actually MetaDataMining now. ..... which is an Advanced Artificial Intelligence Test of ITs SMARTer Enabling Programmer TraffIQ Programs ..... with Civilianised Virtualised CyberSpaceFlight Power Controls.

Currently Perfectly Plausibly Deniable whenever Always Plausibly and/or Recklessly Denied.
While the oil cash mainly goes to the x hundreth king or prince of saudi and their families, as they go and marry x amount of wives - think the 90something tried to marry the 17 year egyptian girl story i read somewhere - and enjoying the ceasers bathroom like entertainment. The rest of the country still remains somewhere in the past, history and hasn't really moved on.

Trying to slave the people off especially from the indian continent desperately looking for jobs and are willing to do any job - these guys are being paid just over £2 a day and 10 litres of water for the day (thats for the whole group of 30) this is modern day 'legal' slavery like the parohos did to the jews, no other country would allow this, in the U.K we have the minimum wage and its illegal to pay less.

That's if the bbc are to be believed. They (saudis) are trying to build a city all from scratch in the middle of the sandy desert!

It's like this, the rich only get richer and the poor stay where they are and die a poor death. The oil running out is good news, also the fact that due to global warming people are buying smaller engine cars and thinking green and some plane companys going bust... all this could only be good for the people that actually want to sustain the planet for future generations, unlike the greedy, rich gits and their profits.

I can't believe they are rewarding them (bankers) for failing with public cash... they should have taken the china rule and... you know what that guy got for taking bribes... i think he got killed.

I'd really like to see all the rich bankers and some kings, royals etc going into the job centre looking for work, that'd be something, just so they know what the average person goes through.