Fujitsu has delivered a supercomputing system to King Abdulaziz University (KAU) in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia for the latter’s new Center of Excellence for researchers and scientists affiliated with KAU.

The new system will significantly boost research capabilities in meteorology and climate modelling, engineering, nano technology, aeronautics, genomic research, real-time vision, bioinformatics, water desalination, and industry-specific numerical simulations in Saudi Arabia.

Through the Center of Excellence, KAU will study possible impacts on the society in the Kingdom such as climate change and also work in collaboration with worldwide scientific communities, regional universities, government departments and commercial organisations on research projects that can benefit from the computer’s capacity.

The integrated and certified cluster-type supercomputer consists of Fujitsu Primergy servers and storage systems that include models from the FUJITSU Storage Eternus series.

Fujitsu will also provide on-site maintenance and training to help implement and operate the project in close collaboration with KAU.

The new system is fully operated and maintained by Fujitsu on-site professionals. The on-site team has HPC engineers and code optimizers, in addition to PhD holders in the field of HPC, and has an ambitious plan to build capacities and disseminate HPC knowledge to KAU researchers.

Fujitsu also provides scientific assistance and collaboration that was recognized by the first scientific publication of results about solving spectrum assignment problems in elastic optical networks. Moreover, significant enhancement in the execution time of different applications such as Genomic Analysis Toolkit, WRF, COSMO, OpenFOAM, and many other has started to play an important role in promoting scientific research at KAU.

The system has been called Aziz and was officially switched on by Prince Mishaal bin Majed bin Abdul Aziz, alongside Akira Kabemoto, head of Service Platform Business, Fujitsu Limited, at a ceremony attended by over 250 researchers, academics, and students.

Prof Abdulfattah Mashat, VP of Development, King Abdulaziz University said: “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. 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.”

Kabemoto said: “The demand for HPC technology is increasing and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and KAU understand the value it will add for industries such as aerospace, meteorology, healthcare, energy, environment and education and for the development of smart cities. As a consequence, we worked in close collaboration with KAU to develop a solution that can deliver the necessary capacity to perform the most sophisticated, computer-intensive simulations/modeling for the country.” – TradeArabia News Service