How is King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) funded?
Al-Ghaslan: The University will be supported through a generous endowment established by King Abdullah. This multi-billion dollar fund will be among the largest university endowments in the world. HPCwire: Can you disclose how much money KAUST has invested in “Shaheen”? Al-Ghaslan: Because of contractual arrangements between KAUST and IBM, we are not at liberty to disclose the total cost of the supercomputer project. Having said that, the most important thing to realize is that KAUST will always make available the finest tools and world-class facilities, central amongst these is scientific computation capability. HPCwire: Did you consider any other supercomputing architectures for the KAUST system besides Blue Gene/P? What were the deciding factors that led you to select the IBM system? Al-Ghaslan: Several architectures were considered. It was clear that no other company could offer the end-to-end solutions like IBM. Some of the decisive features for us included a hugely-scalable and h
