Saudi prince are known for their extravagant lifestyles. As there's no dearth of money they expect only the best thing. And no matter how costly it is, once they set their eyes on it they must get it. This description perfectly suits Saudi Arabia's Kind Abdullah. After having decided to be built world's best technological university, the king wants nothing but the best for his university. And to fulfill his dream he's spending money like anything. I am sure the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology will be the one to look out for in future. The latest news regarding this university is the of course the IBM Shaheen. Reportedly, IBM and KAUST are working on a joint project to develop one of the world's fastest supercomputer, to be housed in KAUST. The new system, named Shaheen (Arabic word for the Peregrine falcon, a bird which can reach dive speeds of up to 213 miles per hour), will serve the University's scientific researchers across dozens of disciplines, advance new innovations in computational sciences, and contribute to the further development of a knowledge-based society in Saudi Arabia.

The 16-rack Blue Gene/P System is capable of 222 Teraflops - or 222 trillion floating point operations - per second, and will become the fastest supercomputer in the region and equivalent to the fastest in Europe. According to the industry TOP500 list, Shaheen would rank sixth in the world in terms of performance, and is designed to scale upward. Within two years, KAUST will make available a petaflop computing capability, putting the University on a path toward exascale computing in the near future. The machine will also be one of the most energy-efficient supercomputers globally, in keeping with the high environmental standards to which KAUST holds itself.

The supercomputer will offer:

* 65,536 independent processing cores, tightly coupled in a three-dimensional network.
* Potential to implement a petaflop machine within the next two or three years, which could provide scalability over the long run for additional demands.
* A next generation data center that is able to scale to exascale computing requirements
* Abundance of high-speed access to local storage capacity
* Connection infrastructure which will support a 40Gbps backbone and 10Gbps connections between building and high speed connection to the global research networks

Majid Al-Ghaslan, KAUST's interim chief information officer and the University's leader in the acquisition, design, and development of the Shaheen supercomputer, said: "The KAUST/IBM Center for Deep Computing Research will enable researchers at KAUST and its partner institutions to unlock the most challenging and complex systems within life sciences, energy, environment, industry, manufacturing, and fundamental research. It will become a magnet for the best research minds in the world."

The Center will initially be located at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Laboratory in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. and will move to the new KAUST campus in the summer of 2009, shortly before the University officially opens in September 2009.