Intel, IBM partner on Dubai HPC competency center

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Several news outlets in the middle east are reporting about a joint venture between IBM and Intel in Dubai Internet City. From Busines 24-7 in the UAE

IBM logoA high performance computing (HPC) centre has been opened in Dubai Internet City in a collaboration between global IT giants IBM and Intel. This is the second such centre IBM and Intel have brought to the region. The first one, based in Abu Dhabi, focuses on HPC only in the oil and gas sector.

Intel logo…Tom Donnelly, Intel’s Director in charge of managing its relationship with IBM in the region, said: “We basically wanted to duplicate what we did in France, which was an HPC competency centre used by local companies to test the performance of particular applications on Intel and IBM equipment. This centre will create a hub for all industries in the Middle East for solving all kinds of business-related problems.”

So, sort of a local EC2 where ISVs can test new software on multiple nodes.

The centre will also be able to serve smaller companies and vendor partners who would (sic) be able to afford their own HPC clusters. It will also be able to reach out to different groups and departments in the academia.

One assumes that should read “would not.” So it looks like a hosted HPC center as well. IBM and Intel also have centers in Russia, the US, and India. Not covered in the stories I found is the pricing model for services, or how one goes about engaging with the centers. Oddly, neither IBM nor Intel appeared to have the news on their corporate sites, and yes I checked IBM’s United Arab Emirates pages (here). Intel’s UAE page is in Arabic, and since I don’t read Arabic, I didn’t get much out of it.

According to the coverage, IBM and Intel say that the hardware in the Dubai center is in test right now and should be available to customers within a few weeks. One of the sources I found, Arabian Business, puts the scale of the resources at a modest 10 nodes

The centre is running a cluster of ten IBM high performance servers, powered by Intel Stokely dual socket 3GHz processors, they said.

Comments

  1. Thanks for such a great article…Its well written and concise.