Fujitsu to Provide HPC and Services to King Abdulaziz University In Saudi Arabia

King Abdulaziz University (KAU) and Fujitsu Ltd announced that a signing ceremony was held on September 21 in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia to kick off a project for a new HPC service solution at KAU.

The new HPC system named Aziz will consist primarily of a cluster of Fujitsu Server Primergy CX250 S2 x86 servers and a storage system that includes models from the Fujitsu storage Eternus series. Furthermore, Fujitsu will provide a number of services such as day-to-day management of operations and operational load of the system by skilled support staff.

KAU plans to use the new system to advance their research capabilities across a number of scientific fields, while offering HPC cloud services to other educational, government, and commercial entities in the region.

Background
KAU is the largest university in Saudi Arabia with more than 160,000 students and 40,000 staff and administration members. It is a technology role model for more than 15 universities in the Kingdom and offers consultancy services for other segments in the region. With this HPC investment, KAU hopes to further establish its role as a technology leader in Saudi Arabia.

In deciding on the specifications for a new HPC system, KAU’s faculties of environmental designs, meteorology, environment and arid land agriculture, computing and IT and genome research provided input about specific requirements. In order to address these needs, Fujitsu has provided integrated and certified ready-to-go HPC cluster solutions optimized for KAU.

Fujitsu has worked to deliver consultancy services and participate with government agencies in planning and problem-solving by delivering results of complex experiments, particularly those involving environmental changes and meteorological accuracy. Furthermore, KAU will be able to increase its research capabilities in engineering, nanotechnology, and simulations, while enhancing its prowess in educational experiments.

System Overview
The large-scale HPC cluster consists of 496 Primergy CX250 S2 and four Primergy CX270 S2 x86 servers, and will have a theoretical peak performance of 230 teraflops (1). For the peripheral systems, 43 Primergy RX300 S8 x86 servers will be used. Furthermore, the 2PB temporary disk storage capacity composed of 55 Eternus DX200 S3 units is connected with FEFS (2), a scalable parallel file system. In addition, the Eternus CS8400 V6 along with a tape storage system offers 6PB of separate archive storage.

Fujitsu will provide not only hardware, but also maintenance and training services, as well as services meant to increase institutional collaboration worldwide by linking the resources of remote organizations to an HPC cloud service that will be hosted on KAU’s new system.

Dr. Abdulfattah Mashat, VP development, King Abdulaziz University, said: “To win this prestigious project, Fujitsu satisfied the varied and challenging HPC requirements of King Abdulaziz University’s faculties of Environmental Designs, Meteorology, Environment and arid land agriculture, computing and IT, and genome research. Fujitsu provides integrated and certified ready-to-go HPC cluster solutions optimized for the University’s specific needs.“

“What’s more, its consultancy services and collaboration with government agencies in planning and problem-solving by delivering results of complicated experiments – particularly regarding environmental changes and meteorology accuracy – will ensure that the solution will deliver the desired results.“

Masahiko Yamada, president of technical computing solutions unit, Fujitsu, said: “Through our supercomputer technology, Fujitsu strives to contribute to building a prosperous society where people can live in peace of mind. We are proud to present KAU with a new supercomputer system, which is based on our strong expertise in HPC, as well as our know-how in services and support. KAU has given a very positive evaluation of the system, and we are confident that it will benefit KAU’s advanced research and educational activities in a variety of fields of science and technology, not only in Saudi Arabia but around the world.“

[1] Teraflops: Tera (meaning trillion) floating-point operations per second. A measure of computing performance.
[2] FEFS: Derived from Fujitsu Exabyte File System. A high-speed distributed file system that can be shared over as many as 100,000 nodes.