OREANDA-NEWS. June 03, 2015. 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.