Government | Tuesday 2 June, 2015 12:43 am |

The Supercomputing System, which has been named “Aziz,” and the Center of Excellence on the campus of King Abdulaziz University (KAU), in partnership with Fujitsu, was launched on Monday.

The inauguration of “Aziz” was presided over by Jeddah Gov. Prince Mishaal bin Majed in the presence of Abdulrahman Alyoubi, interim president of KAU, Akira Kabemoto, senior executive vice president and head of service platform business at Fujitsu, Abdulfattah Mashat, vice president of Development at KAU, King Abdulaziz University faculty, executives from Fujitsu and students.

Mashat gave the introductory speech about “Aziz” and said the program was started three years ago with the strategic plan to boost KAU research and to empower faculty and students.

“At KAU … we deliver a global standard in research resources that supports the public and private sectors 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 on 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,” he said.

The new system will significantly boost research capabilities in meteorology and climate modeling, engineering, nanotechnology, aeronautics, genomic research, real-time vision, bioinformatics, water desalination, and industry-specific numerical simulations in the Kingdom, and will support many researchers and scientists affiliated with KAU.
“This will be a big shift in research work for KAU and for the whole country. This has huge capability of almost 12,000 cores, eight PB storage and 600 compute nodes,” he added.