Saudi Arabia Begins To Realize Supercomputer Ambitions 191
An anonymous reader writes "Saudi Arabia is building a supercomputer that could rank among the 10 most powerful systems in the world. And the country isn't stopping there. It has plans to turn this marquee system for the Middle East into a petascale system in two years, and, beyond that, an exascale system."
I once sold softwar to Saudi Arabia (Score:5, Interesting)
The software was a big mess: A hospital management system (basically an accounting package) written in FORTRAN!.
It had evolved over decades. It was pretty much unsupportable, but we had the old developers in-house, so they were able to solve the weird bugs usually.
To our surprise, they did not want the regular compiled version with customer support. They just wanted the source code.
We told them that the source code was not for sale. It was also too embarrassing to release.
They then put an enormous amount of money on the table, and promised to keep it in house.
We said OK, and expected a lot of support calls at least for them to compile and install the system.
We never heard from them again. Ever.
Best sale ever.
Maybe IBM has entered into the same kind of deal. Would be great to get a follow up in a few years to see how this computer is being used.
Underground Supercomputer (Score:4, Interesting)
When I think about Saudi Arabia though one of the first things that comes to mind is that it's very hot. Building a super computer in a hot country must be quite a challenge from a cooling point of view.
I was wondering was if anyone has considered building a supercomputer in an underground cavern. They are, after all, naturally pretty cool. You would still need cooling to keep it that way but you would be sheilded from the worst of the sun.
Re:Working in the above mentioned place.. (Score:1, Interesting)
I confirm this. ARAMCO hires the best people in the industry and they do ALL of their work ie exploration to production and leave only the menial of jobs to large service companies like Halliburton and Schulmberger.
But considering that oil is their lifeline I am not surprised.
Re:Simulating... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:At least it does something for secular educatio (Score:1, Interesting)
citizens don't pay taxes but get a part of the petroleum money. They have, in fact, negative taxes.
No we don't. *Is Saudi*
True, there are no taxes. But citizens don't get anything of the oil revenues directly. Unless you count the public services and institutions funded by it.
Education is free, though. Better yet, college students get a modest pay out of it (About $300 a month).