Communications of the ACM
Saudi Arabia's New Technology niversity Opens Its Doors
Construction continues at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
Credit: JB. Picoulet & S. Louri / IEEE Spectrum
On an afternoon in late July, Tony Eastham sat in a half-built office outside Jeddah, in Saudi Arabia. Outside, the whines and growls of construction heralded the rise of a university in the desert. These facilities are part of the hardware that makes up the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, an ambitious graduate-level research university with a multibillion-dollar endowment. Known as KAUST, the institution will open its doors to students for the first time this month.
"What's happening here is an experiment, one that is only possible because of the resources available in Saudi Arabia," says Eastham, until recently an engineering professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
Once completed, the university will include a top-notch nanofabrication laboratory and a visualization and virtual reality center designed by the University of California, San Diego. The crown jewel is Shaheen, an IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer capable of 222 teraflops and ranked 14th in the world.
The university's first batch of faculty was recruited by partner universities such as the University of Cambridge, Imperial College London, and the University of California, Berkeley. The inaugural class of 350 students is drawn predominantly from China, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and the United States.
From IEEE Spectrum
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