14 DAY TRIAL // IBM announced that it is currently working on building a new supercomputer, which is said to be delivered to the University of Science and Technology of Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah. The supercomputer is stated to become one of the world's most powerful systems. The new IBM-built system will be named Shaheen, which is Arabic for "peregrine falcon".
According to Big Blue, the new supercomputer is a 16-rack Blue Gene/P system which features 65,536 processor cores able to deliver speeds of up to 222 TFLOPS. The company expects the system to be deployed as the sixth fastest supercomputer in the world. The University announced that it plans to add capacity to the machine, so as to make it a petascale system in two years.
IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. is the place where the new supercomputer is being built.
King Abdullah University in Thuwal is stated to open its gates in September 2009. The new supercomputer will be installed in its data center, which is expected to open sometime next summer. “The best thing about [the new university] is we have no legacy systems and no legacy thinking,” said interim CIO Majid Al-Ghaslan.
According to Al-Ghaslan, the new powerful system is to be used by researchers for working in a wide range of areas in life and physical sciences, including processing and studying data for the massive oil fields Saudi Arabia has. Another usage of the system will be high-performance computing research.
According to officials, Shaheen is expected to attract scientists from around the world to the university. “World-class scientists expect world-class facilities,” Al-Ghaslan explained.
Earlier this year, the Big Blue deployed the world's largest and fastest supercomputer for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The system managed to break down the petascale mark in June, delivering 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second.