RIYADH: Saudi Arabia has announced it is acquiring a supercomputer that could rank among the 10 most powerful systems in the world. Plans are also in to turn this marquee system for the Middle East into a petascale system in two years, and, beyond that, an exascale system.

This supercomputer, being built by IBM, will be located at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) which is due to open in a year. A data centre that will house the supercomputer will be completed by summer next year. “The best thing about KAUST is we have no legacy systems and no legacy thinking,” Majid Al-Ghaslan, the university’s interim CIO, told Computerworld.

The system, named Shaheen, is a 16-rack IBM Blue Gene/P System with 65,536 processor cores delivering 222 Teraflops (222 trillion operations per second.). The value of the project was not disclosed. IBM estimates that Shaheen will rank about No. 6 in the world when completed, but the university also has plans to quickly add capacity.

The data centre it is building will be large enough to hold 500 racks, and although that includes space for storage and other IT equipment, there will be a lot of room to grow. development work on the Shaheen at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Laboratory in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. The work has started, and the aim is to have the supercomputer ready for the official opening of KAUST in September 2009.