Shaheen (supercomputer)
| Company type | Supercomputer system |
|---|---|
| Industry | High-performance computing |
| Founded | 2009 |
| Headquarters | Thuwal , Saudi Arabia |
| Products | Shaheen I, Shaheen II, Shaheen III supercomputers |
| Owner | King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) |
Shaheen denotes a lineup of supercomputer systems managed by King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia. Bearing the name of the Peregrine Falcon, its newest iteration, Shaheen III, holds the distinction of being the most extensive and powerful supercomputer across the Middle East.
Shaheen I
The inaugural version (2009–2015) consisted of an IBM Blue Gene/P platform, initially constructed at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center before its transfer to KAUST in 2009. This system was engineered under the guidance of Majid Alghaslan during his time at KAUST.[1]
Its primary elements encompassed:
- 16 Blue Gene/P racks achieving a peak output of 222 Teraflops
- 164 IBM IBM System x 3550 Xeon nodes providing a peak capacity of 12 Teraflops
Performance
Shaheen I incorporated:
- A total of 65,536 processing cores
- Connectivity at 10 Gbit/s to global academic and research networks
The file storage system along with the Spectra Logic TFinity tape library operated seamlessly across both Blue Gene and Linux clusters, all linked through a unified campus-wide network backbone accessible from every building and via the Internet.
Shaheen II
Introduced in 2015, Shaheen II is a supercomputer built on a 36-cabinet Cray XC40 architecture.[2] By June 2022, it was ranked as the world’s 97th fastest supercomputer, boasting an Rmax performance of 5.54 petaFLOPS.[3]
Services
The KAUST Supercomputing Laboratory (KSL) provides access to Shaheen’s capabilities to assist faculty research efforts through training, application development, consultation, and collaborative initiatives. Offered services include:
- Scheduling and comprehensive support for Shaheen utilization
- High-performance computing (HPC) assistance addressing significant research challenges
- Cooperative development on HPC applications, middleware, libraries, and algorithms
- Enabling application development, porting, and scalability
- Implementation of HPC program best practices
- Engagement in external scientific research projects
- Training programs covering HPC system administration, programming, application optimization, and algorithm design
Research topics
KAUST utilizes the Shaheen infrastructure to concentrate on four principal research domains:
- Energy resources and environmental studies
- Biosciences and bioengineering
- Materials science and engineering disciplines
- Applied mathematics alongside computational sciences
The datasets employed are distinctive to the Saudi Arabia region, with an emphasis on oil and gas deposits, data from the Red Sea, and other geographically specific resources.
Restrictions
Although KAUST enforces policies against discrimination, IBM and Cray must adhere to U.S. export controls concerning advanced computing technologies. As a result, individuals from Syria, Iran, Sudan, Cuba, and North Korea are prohibited from accessing these supercomputing resources.
Institutional partners
The Shaheen supercomputing project at KAUST represents a partnership between Cray and KAUST. Additionally, KSL collaborates with prominent institutions and organizations such as:
- Oxford Center for Collaborative Applied Mathematics (OCCAM) at Oxford University
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
- Imperial College London
- Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
- Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
- Institut Français du Pétrole
- National University of Singapore
- American University in Cairo
- Technische Universität München
- GE Global Research
- King Abdulaziz City for Science & Technology
- King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals
- Saudi Aramco
- Wipro Arabia
- Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur