Saudi Arabia unveils grand supercomputer ambitions

Asked to explain why the country would need such compute power, Al-Ghaslan said the computing capability would help Saudi Arabia conduct research on its energy supplies. "We have some of the largest oil fields, onshore and offshore, in the world," he said. These are areas of such size that generate huge numbers that take large amounts of computing capability, he said.

Also, the university also wants to establish itself as an important research center, and Al-Ghaslan said the supercomputer would help attract scientists from around the world. "World class scientists expect world-class facilities," he said.

IBM was picked for the project in part for its work on Roadrunner, and its ability to run codes at petascale speed, said Al-Ghaslan.

The supercomputer is being built in the US at IBM's TJ Watson Research Laboratory, and will be moved next year to Saudi Arabia.

One of the more notable supercomputing developments in that region was in Iran, which last year built a high performance computing system using 216 Opteron chips from Advanced Micro Devices. The system wasn't powerful enough to make the Top500 list. Iran has also used Intel chips to build clusters.

US companies are banned from supplying Iran with technology, but the technology can easily find its way to Iran through companies operating in Dubai and elsewhere.