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Saudi supercomputer makes top 10 list of most powerful

JUL 14, 2015
Physics Today

BBC : King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Thuwal, Saudi Arabia has spent $80 million to purchase, install, and operate a new Cray XC40 supercomputer 25 times as powerful as the one it is replacing. With 200 000 processors in 6000 nodes, 17.6 PB of storage, and 760 TB of memory, the computer, named Shaheen II, is capable of 5.536 petaflops (floating-point operations per second). That puts it in seventh position on the Top 500’s twice-yearly ranking of supercomputers—the first time in the list’s 22 years that a computer based in the Middle East has made the top 10. The university is using the computer to model turbulence in engines, atmospheric dynamics, and renewable energy grids.

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