HPC in Saudi Arabia: from Petroleum to Genomics

Saudi Arabia is currently host to six computers in the Top500, one at KAUST and five at Aramco. While the petroleum industry has been the historical motivation for supercomputing in the Middle East, with its workloads of seismic imaging and reservoir modeling, the attraction today is full-orbed. We review the current and planned scientific and engineering campaigns on the petascale hardware currently deployed at KAUST and the role of HPC elsewhere in the country, including four Gordon Bell Prize finalist papers within the past three years and a 2024 Gordon Bell winner. We take stock of what is now a generation of HPC and CS&E graduates of a university SIAM described at its founding in 2009 as “the world’s first CS&E university” and their roles in Saudi Arabia and well beyond.