DHAHRAN, 30 October 2007 — Information and communications technologies are at the foundation of a knowledge society and thus will be of utmost importance to the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). Only days after the king laid the university’s foundation stone, the KAUST IT Summit was held to consider “Next Generation Cyber-infrastructure.”
Invited to the summit held at Saudi Aramco’s conference center, were 17 experts in computer science, e-science, data intensive supercomputing and Internet scale systems. Notables included Professor Peter Lee, Vice Provost for Research and Head of the Computer Science Department, Carnegie Mellon University; Dr. Jack Breese, former Director for Microsoft Research and Dr. Lawrence Roberts, one of the “founding fathers of the Internet.” Significant players in the IT business community such as Tony Hey, Corporate Vice President of External Research at Microsoft, Dr. Usama Fayyad, Chief Data Officer & Executive VP, Research and Strategic Data Solutions Yahoo! and Dr. Werner Vogels, CTO Amazon.com, put forward their views on the requirements of managing large data centers and networks. From Saudi Arabia, Dr. Ibrahim Al-Mishari, retired CIO of Saudi Aramco and Professor Mohammed Al-Suwaiyal, president of King Abdul Aziz City for Science and Technology (KACST), shed light on the local environment and its challenges.
The mixture of industry leaders and experts from academia ensured that there would be no shortage of diverse views and talking points. One of the highlights of the discussion was the importance of computational science, which has emerged as the third pillar of research, one that complements theory and experimentation. The summit addressed the trends in computational science, as well as the requirements of information and communication technologies needed to support research and education at KAUST. The panel also offered recommendations on how KAUST could best be positioned to participate in next generation data-centric supercomputing.
“To create a world-class research institution, we must ensure that we have the next-generation infrastructure to support the computing and communications needs of all of our academic programs and research for the next decade,” said KAUST’s Interim CIO Majid Alghaslan.
Alghaslan had been the lead organizer for the event and he stated that all the panelists were highly recognized and well respected in IT. “We were extremely lucky to attract them all together at once given their busy schedules and commitments. However, this was possible due to their trust of our king’s vision for KAUST as a world-class 21st century research university. We anticipate learning from all of them. They are all truly pioneers in their own fields,” he remarked.
When asked which areas of research would be KAUST’s focus in applied mathematics and computational science, Alghaslan remarked that the ideas of the planners at KAUST “are not set on stone yet and will be discussed with the panel. However, one model for example we are thinking of is trying to find niche areas that can distinguish KAUST. The beauty and uniqueness we have with KAUST is that we have a Greenfield or “Blue Sky” where we are truly targeting KAUST to be a forward thinking progressive university in all aspects. Traditional or legacy boundaries and systems simply don’t exist due to the fact that we are starting from scratch. We realize that we are at a big advantage at KAUST.”
The KAUST CIO stated that the planning teams have received input from experts at leading universities across the world. Now, their challenge is to capitalize on “this great opportunity” and build a truly innovative computing and communications infrastructure. He went on to explain that KAUST will be catering to a “connected” or “digital” generation and that in this day and age people expect to be constantly connected. That means they must be able to have “e-everything” coupled with the ability to access high-speed computing and information resources securely from anywhere via any device.
“In my days you had to go to the computer labs on campus via one of the terminals and you had to be good friends with the lab administrator to ensure you always had a terminal for your work,” Alghaslan reminisced with a smile. “These days students build and compile their code sitting in a Starbucks while enjoying their latte. They are able to interact with high performance computing services and upload their code to a server on campus or submit it online to their professors.”
He added: “In addition, the ability to interact and collaborate with people on and off campus and across the globe is what this generation expects. Therefore, KAUST will also have high-speed connectivity to the major research networks across the globe in addition to the latest instructional technologies available. Again, the uniqueness we have is that we don’t have legacy systems or thinking. We have already defined some major elements in our computing and communications vision based on our understanding of the students, faculty and staff we are catering to and we have also built-in some future proofing and flexibility for our planned facilities.”
During the conference, Alghaslan showed an artist’s rendering of how certain buildings in the planned KAUST campus will appear. He mentioned that the idea of the space committed to the KAUST data center was to make the area usable in many different configurations and to have plenty of room for growth.
“The basic theme is to make our computing and communications facilities the latest and accessible from anywhere to our research and faculty, while protecting the integrity of their data in a secure environment,” said Alghaslan. “One prominent researcher I spoke with said that his best ideas always came to him at home at night while trying to fall asleep. At that time, when he’d try to connect to his resources on campus, he would either get the famous access denied message, or a message advising him to call the system administrator! This deficiency of course is an unwelcomed obstacle to the next big idea!”
Since KAUST is planned to become a “smart-city,” the campus will have an adjacent community, town center and recreation facilities. It is expected that wireless access will be available throughout the entire site, with fiber optics connectivity to every residential unit where Data/Voice/Video are delivered on the same infrastructure.
“We are planning that there will be abundant communications and computing resources throughout KAUST. The campus will be equipped with a truly unified digital infrastructure capable of serving students, faculty, staff, and their families anytime and anywhere,” Alghaslan emphasized. “ Remember that KAUST is building all of its facilities and research labs to cater to thought leaders conducting world class research so its ICT services must be the same. In addition, KAUST truly recognizes that IT will be one key factor enabling derivation of novel scientific theories and knowledge.”
