Another successful high-performance computing deployment has come to fruition at King Abdulaziz University (KAU). The Fujitsu-built machine, called Aziz, was officially switched on by His Royal Highness Prince Mishaal bin Majed bin Abdul Aziz. The ceremony was attended by Akira Kabemoto, head of Fujitsu’s service platform business, and some 250 researchers, academics and students.
The event also served to launch KAU’s Center of Excellence. The 230-teraflops (peak) cluster and new center will support leading-edge research in fields with regional significance, including meteorology and climate modeling, nanotechnology, aeronautics, genomic research, real-time vision, bioinformatics, water desalination, and a wide range of numeric simulations. These efforts are all part of KAU’s mission “to enrich society through cultural prominence, scientific acumen and pioneering research.”
For Aziz, KAU opted for an integrated and certified cluster-type supercomputer consisting of 496 FUJITSU PRIMERGY CX250 S2 servers and four PRIMERGY CX270 x86 servers, connected to a storage system from the FUJITSU Storage ETERNUS series. Components include:
- Intel E5-2695v2 (2.4GHz, 12 cores)
- Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor 5110P (1053GHz, 60 cores)
- NVIDIA Tesla K20 GPU (706MHz, 2,496 CUDA cores)
Fujitsu also supplied 43 PRIMERGY RX300 servers to be used as “peripheral systems.”
System selection was carried out by the Department of Meteorology, Environment and Arid Land Agriculture with input from the faculty of Computer and Information Technology and Genomic Research Center. The team sought “a bespoke system that is a one-stop solution for a wide variety of research endevours.” Fujtisu will also provide support, maintenance and HPC training in tune with KAU’s needs.
“As the largest university in Saudi Arabia, we deliver a global standard in research resources that supports the public and private sector in the Kingdom,” shared Prof. Abdulfattah Mashat, vice president of development at King Abdulaziz University, in a prepared statement. “We also focus on developing our ICT solutions that allows over 160,000 students to flourish at KAU. As a consequence, our investment in Fujitsu’s HPC technology helped KAU deliver upon its responsibilities by providing a reliable solution for students, academics and researches, who can leverage our new Center of Excellence and the technical support it will provide.”
KAU has ambitious plans for Aziz to serve the needs of many researchers and disciplines, but priority will be given to regional use cases that affect Saudi Arabia. Initial cycles will be devoted to modeling sandstorms and developing technology for the desalination of seawater. Key application codes include the Genomic Analysis Toolkit, WRF, COSMO and OpenFOAM. Fujitsu has assigned dedicated on-site experts to assist with research and code optimization efforts at the Center of Excellence for Climate Change Research so that KAU researchers will be able to get the most benefit from this state-of-the-art system.
Saudia Arabia claims the largest share of supercomputers in the Middle East, where the need for supercomputers is being driven by industry and academic applications alike. Japanese server-maker Fujitsu is a major supplier throughout Asia and Europe.