Culture & Education | Thursday 4 June, 2015 2:01 am |

King Abdulaziz University (KAU) and Fujitsu have today announced delivery of a new supercomputing system. KAU switched on the system, and in so doing, inaugurated a Center of Excellence that will support the many 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 the Kingdom. 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 world wide scientific communities, regional universities, government departments and commercial organisations on research projects that can benefit from the computer’s capacity.

Building on over 30 years of experience in high performance computing (HPC) development, the integrated and certified cluster-type supercomputer consists of Fujitsu PRIMERGY servers and storage systems that include models from the FUJITSU Storage ETERNUS series. The result is a system that has the necessary reliability to deliver excellent performance of scientific and engineering applications.

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

Whilst the Department of Meteorology, Environment and Arid Land Agriculture commissioned the project, the faculty of Computer and Information Technology and Genomic Research Center provided individual specifications to help Fujitsu deliver a bespoke system that is a one-stop solution for a wide variety of research endevours.

KAU, which is the largest university in Saudi Arabia, can now offer high-end computational modeling and simulation capabilities beyond academia and for the commercial and manufacturing industries in the Kingdom.

In its first efforts to put this system to practical use, KAU is initiating research to create meteorological models of particular interest to Saudi Arabia, such as for sand storms, and to develop technogy for the desalination of seawater.

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 dissiminate 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.

Fujitsu assigns dedicated personnel specialized in climate change research and code optimization to support the Center of Excellence for Climate Change Research of KAU so that it will utilize the full potential of this state-of-the-art system as it performs weather and climate research.

The system has been called Aziz and was officially switched on by His Royal Highness 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.



Supporting quotes

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

Akira Kabemoto, Head of Service Platform Business, Fujitsu Limited:
“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.”

System Overview

The system has a theoretical peak performance of 230 teraflops (*1). The large-scale HPC cluster consists of 496 PRIMERGY CX250 and four PRIMERGY CX270 x86 servers, and has the following components:
- Intel E5-2695v2 (2.4GHz 12 Cores)
- Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessor 5110P (1053GHz 60Cores)
- NVIDIA Tesla K20 (706MHz 2496 CUDA cores)

For the peripheral systems, 43 PRIMERGY RX300 x86 servers are used. Furthermore, the 2-petabyte (PB) temporary disk storage capacity composed of 55 ETERNUS DX200 units is connected with FEFS(*2), a scalable parallel file system. In addition, the ETERNUS CS8400 V6 along with a tape storage system offers 6 petabytes of separate archive storage.

Glossary and Notes
1. Teraflops
Tera (meaning "trillion") floating-point operations per second. A measure of computing performance.

2. FEFS:
Fujitsu Exabyte File System. A high-speed distributed file system that can be shared over as many as 100,000 nodes.

For more information:
Fujitsu Technical Computing: http://www.fujitsu.com/global/solutions/business-technology/tc/


Press Contacts
Fujitsu Limited
Public and Investor Relations Division
Inquiries: https://www-s.fujitsu.com/global/news/contacts/inquiries/index.html

KAU
HPC Center
hpc@kau.edu.sa

About Fujitsu
Fujitsu is the leading Japanese information and communication technology (ICT) company, offering a full range of technology products, solutions, and services. Approximately 159,000 Fujitsu people support customers in more than 100 countries. We use our experience and the power of ICT to shape the future of society with our customers. Fujitsu Limited (TSE: 6702) reported consolidated revenues of 4.8 trillion yen (US$40 billion) for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2015. For more information, please see http://www.fujitsu.com.


About KAU
King Abdulaziz University (KAU) was founded in 1967 in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. KAU currently has more than 6,000 faculty and more than140,000 students. The university has number of scientific and theatrical fields of study and the exclusiveness of certain specializations such as Seas Sciences, Nuclear Engineering, and Medical Engineering. The university also has many research centers of excellence that foster quality and pioneer research.

All company or product names mentioned herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. Information provided in this press release is accurate at time of publication and is subject to change without advance notice.