Riyadh: King Abdullah University of Science and Technology has decided to accelerate its Artificial Intelligence with the upcoming supercomputer Shaheen III.
Supercomputing capacity has become increasingly vital to global innovation, industry competitiveness and economic growth.
From accelerating vaccine discovery to fight a pandemic, advancing clean energy systems to increase sustainability, to enabling new possibilities in AI, supercomputing is a core technology for solving the world’s most challenging scientific and engineering problems.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced that they have been selected by KAUST to build Shaheen III. The supercomputer is expected to promote advancement in the fields of food, water, energy and the environment.
The new Shaheen III system will revolutionize KAUST’s ability to process vast amounts of data at immense speed and scale.
It is set to be 20 times faster than KAUST’s existing system and will be the most powerful supercomputer in the Middle East, enabling its users to unlock discoveries that it could not have before, and realize new potentials for AI.
Shaheen III will be built using the HPE Cray EX supercomputer. With its design, HPE is further fueling KAUST’s AI-at-scale mission by integrating the HPE Machine Learning Development Environment, an optimized software stack for model training and development.
President and CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Antonio Neri said “At HPE, our purpose is to advance the way people live and work, and we are honoured to help fuel Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 for a new era of innovation by empowering KAUST with a state-of-the-art supercomputer.”
President of KAUST, Dr. Tony F. Chan said that the new HPE Cray EX system will allow them to conduct research on a larger scale, resulting in significant scientific, economic and social advances.
Shaheen III will be fully operational in 2023.
The new supercomputer will process unique data sets in focus areas such as clean combustion, Red Sea ecosystems, climate modelling and the Arabian tectonic plate while delivering analyses, models and simulations at a superior level of resolution.
The Shaheen III will enable the development of novel and scalable techniques in core AI fields such as deep learning, reinforcement learning, federated learning, visual computing, and natural language processing as it is equipped with more than 2,800 NVIDIA Grace Hopper Superchips.
