Saudi Aramco Selects One of the World's Most Powerful Commercial Supercomputers from IBM.Business Editors, Hi-Tech Writers DALLAS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--November 7, 2000 Saudi Aramco, a leading global petroleum company, has completed the installation of an IBM SP supercomputer, considered to be one of the largest commercial supercomputers in the world. Working together with Saudi Business Machines (SBM SBM - Solution Based Modelling ), IBM (International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY, www.ibm.com) The world's largest computer company. IBM's product lines include the S/390 mainframes (zSeries), AS/400 midrange business systems (iSeries), RS/6000 workstations and servers (pSeries), Intel-based servers (xSeries) general marketing and services representative in Saudi Arabia, and a team of IBM experts, Saudi Aramco team has completed the installation of a 92-node IBM SP system in just two weeks. The installation at Saudi Aramco represents one of the most powerful supercomputer in the commercial sector outside the USA. It is based at the company's headquarters in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. The supercomputer is powered by state-of-the-art IBM POWER3 microprocessors. The IBM nodes have varying number of processors ranging from two to eight. This high-performance SP system is designed to allow Saudi Aramco to run complex seismic applications to explore for oil and gas. The SP supercomputer is connected to over 100 TB (100 Trillion Bytes) of IBM high performance Serial Storage Architecture Serial Storage Architecture - (SSA) IBM's proposed ANSI standard for a standard high-speed interface to disk clusters and arrays. SSA allows full-duplex packet multiplexed serial data transfers at rates of 20Mb/sec in each direction. (SSA (Serial Storage Architecture) A fault tolerant peripheral interface from IBM that transfers data at 80 and 160 Mbytes/sec. SSA uses SCSI commands, allowing existing software to drive SSA peripherals, which are typically disk drives. ) disks. These disks are used with the IBM General Parallel File Systems (GPFS GPFS General Parallel File System GPFS General Purpose Financial Statements GPFS General Purpose Flight Simulator GPFS Gallery Parallel File System ) to furnish the seismic data to the computer nodes. The technology deployed is among the most advanced in the world. This same technology is being used in the world's largest supercomputer - ASCI White - which is currently housed at US Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory: see Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. (body) Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory - (LLNL) A research organaisatin operated by the University of California under a contract with the US Department of Energy. in California. "The increasing domestic and foreign demand for gas requires analysis of the most sophisticated and accurate data that we can obtain," says Vincent W. Garcia, Client Manager for Saudi Aramco at SBM in Al-Khobar. "This is made possible through the use of powerful processors such as the IBM SP". Ali Dulaim, SBM Regional Manager - Eastern Province, comments: "The speed and smoothness of the installation is testimony to the skill and dedication of our joint team. Though it was a team effort, I would like to give particular praise to the Saudi Aramco team who demonstrated outstanding technical and organizational expertise throughout." About IBM UNIX Systems More than 1 million IBM RS/6000 systems have been shipped to over 150,000 commercial and technical customers around the world. The RS/6000 family of computers features IBM RISC-based microprocessors and runs AIX (Advanced Interactive eXecutive) IBM's Unix-based operating system which runs on its Intellistation workstations and pSeries, p5, iSeries and i5 server families. , IBM's UNIX operating system Noun 1. UNIX operating system - trademark for a powerful operating system UNIX, UNIX system operating system, OS - (computer science) software that controls the execution of computer programs and may provide various services . RS/6000 delivers the industry's most complete UNIX UNIX Operating system for digital computers, developed by Ken Thompson of Bell Laboratories in 1969. It was initially designed for a single user (the name was a pun on the earlier operating system Multics). offerings by combining applications with hardware, software, service, and support -- a combination that yields new levels of high availability, scalability, system management, performance, and Deep Computing capabilities. About Saudi Aramco The Saudi Arabian Oil Company (Saudi Aramco) is the largest oil producing company in the world. Saudi Aramco employs more than 55,000 people from more than 50 countries. About 85 percent of the employees are Saudis who hold practically all of the company's management and most of its operating positions. |
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