Supercomputing & Networking

Shaheen consists primarily of a 16-rack IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer owned and operated by King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). Built in partnership with IBM, Shaheen is intended to enable KAUST Faculty and Partners to research both large- and small-scale projects, from inception to realization.

Shaheen, named after the Peregrine Falcon, is the largest and most powerful supercomputer in the Middle East and is intended to grow into a petascale facility by the year 2011,Originally built at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, Shaheen was moved to KAUST in mid-2009.

Systems
Shaheen includes the following functional elements:

• 16 racks of Blue Gene/P, having a peak performance of 222 Teraflops
• 128 IBM IBM System x 3550 Xeon nodes, having a peak performance of 12 Teraflops

Shaheen's performance and computing capabilities include

• 65,536 independent processing cores.
• A next generation data center that is able to scale to exascale computing requirements
• 10 Gbps access to world's academic and research networks.

The file system and tape drive will be mounted across both the Blue Gene system and the Linux cluster. All elements of the system will be connected together on a common network backbone that is accessible from all campus buildings.

The Shaheen system at KAUST Supercomputing Laboratory (KSL) is available to help KAUST users and projects, to provide training and advice, to develop and deploy applications, to provide consultation on best practices and to provide collaboration support as needed.

KAUST Faculty will have access to:

• General support for Shaheen facility use, including usage scheduling of Shaheen and peripheral systems
• High-performance computing support for "Grand Challenges" by collaboration with the Center to deliver fundamental breakthroughs in specific areas of research
• Collaboration to provide high-performance computing applications, middleware, library, algorithm support and enablement services
• Applications Enablement where users can task the CDCR to develop, enable, port and scale key applications
• High-performance Computing Program Best Practice Management techniques
• Participation with KAUST researchers in external projects
• Training on high-performance computing systems management, programming, applications tuning and algorithms

KAUST’s advanced IT infrastructure will include ubiquitous wireless and wired connectivity, with a 40 Gbps backbone and multiple 10 Gbps connections between campus buildings. Abundant dark fibre is ready to be activated when needed. KAUST will also be connected to the world’s IT networks, eventually running at 10 Gbps directly to Internet2 and GEANT2.

High-performance storage and networking subsystems support the capability of Shaheen :a

• Multiple storage building blocks providing a total of 1.9 Petabytes of raw capacity and an aggregate bandwidth of 16 Gbps
• A Linux node x86 Cluster as an auxiliary computational resource for pre- and post-processing, as well as for initial x86 code tests prior to their enablement on Shaheen
• A high-speed internal network subsystem
• A high-capacity archiving subsystem to assure data resiliency and system backup
• More than 65,600 independent processing cores, tightly coupled in a three-dimensional network
• A next-generation data center that has the scalability to achieve exascale computing requirements