Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 21 | Page 9

NEWS KSA ANSYS, Saudi Aramco and KAUST achieve supercomputing milestone The calculations were run on the Shaheen II, a Cray XC40 supercomputer, hosted at the KAUST Supercomputing Core Lab (KSL). ANSYS, Saudi Aramco and King Abdullah University of Science and Technology have achieved a new supercomputing milestone by scaling ANSYS Fluent to nearly 200,000 processor cores. This record represents a more than five- fold increase over the record set just three years ago, which will enable organisations to make critical decisions faster and increase the overall efficiency of oil and gas production facilities. By leveraging high-performance computing, ANSYS, Saudi Aramco and the KSL sped up a complex simulation of a separation vessel from several weeks to an overnight run. This simulation is critical to all oil and gas production facilities, empowering organisations around the world to reduce design development time and better predict equipment performance under varying operational conditions. Saudi Aramco will apply this technology to make more-informed, timely decisions to retrofit separation vessels to optimise operation throughout an oil field's lifetime. "Today's regulatory requirements and market expectations mean that manufacturers must develop products that are cleaner, safer, more efficient and more reliable," said Wim Slagter, director of HPC and cloud alliances at ANSYS. "To reach such targets, designers and engineers must understand product performance with higher accuracy than ever before, especially for separation technologies, where an improved separation performance can immediately increase the efficiency and profitability of an oil field. “The supercomputing collaboration between ANSYS, Saudi Aramco and KSL enabled enhanced insight in complex gas, water and crude-oil flows inside a separation vessel.” Partnership praised by prince A Saudi telecommunications company has won some extra special praise. HRH Prince Faisal bin Mishaal Al Saud, governor of Qassim, stated that: “Saudi Telecom Company’s (STC) services emulates the best global peers, and we see innovation and quality of services from our national company.” After signing the technological agreement between the governorate and the company, in addition to launching several technological agreements, his highness added: “We value and thank STC for the services offered and those yet to be offered in Qassim and all around the kingdom. “It is truly the strategic partner on which we depend to implement different initiatives specially regarding IT security and antiviruses. “STC will participate largely in the smart technical transformation which we strongly seek to provide convenient service for nationals and residents and to create an integrated smart and paperless environment. We in the governorate of Qassim, in cooperation with STC, are the pioneers in activating this trend which complies with the goals of 2030 vision”. www.intelligentcio.com Nasser Al Nasser, Technology and Operations SVP, thanked the prince for his evaluation of STC services. “The cooperation with Qassim governorate is the best model of partnership between public and private sectors,” he said. He stated that the partnership with Qassim governorate aims to transfer it to a smart region. INTELLIGENTCIO 9