Saudi Arabia · decommissioned · hpc

Shaheen

Also known as Blue Gene/P Solution

Operated by KAUST at KAUST Supercomputing Core Lab .

Phase 1 seed dataset, compiled by hand. These rows were built from public operator, laboratory and vendor sources. A mechanical second-reader pass has since fetched every cited source: 1092 of 1153 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 40 are genuinely weakly sourced. Every claim carries its source and a confidence tier. Treat anything below verified as a lead, not a citation.

Measured performance

Rmax: 190.90 TFlop/s
Rpeak: 222.82 TFlop/s
Rmax ÷ Rpeak: 85.7%
Cores: 65,536
Power: 504 kW
Per watt: 0.4 GF/W

Figures are as last publicly reported for the configuration described below, not a live measurement. Where a system was upgraded in place, the post-upgrade configuration is shown and the earlier one appears in the timeline.

What this machine is made of

One row per supplier relationship. “Supplier at build” is the company that shipped the part at the time; where that company has since been acquired, the parent it rolls up to today is shown beside it. That distinction is what makes ticker-level aggregation possible across a thirty-year dataset.

Role	Part	Supplier at build	Quantity	Confidence	Source
Integrator	- IBM	IBM IBMNYSE	-	Verified	eurekalert.org kaust.edu.sa
CPU	IBM PowerPC 450 850MHz CPUs PowerPC · 4C · 0.85 GHz · 90 nm PowerPC 450 4C 850MHz	IBM IBMNYSE	65,536 verified	Verified	top500.org eurekalert.org
Interconnect	IBM BlueGene 3D torus Interconnect 3D torus, plus separate collective and barrier networks · 175 MB/s per link per direction Blue Gene/P proprietary interconnect (3D torus plus collective network)	IBM IBMNYSE	-	Reported	top500.org

The read

KAUST's first supercomputer and the system that gave the Shaheen line its name (Arabic for peregrine falcon): a 16-rack IBM Blue Gene/P, jointly announced by KAUST and IBM on 22 September 2008 while KAUST's own campus was still under construction, initially assembled at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York before relocating to Thuwal for the university's 2009 opening. The announcement projected a 222 TFlop/s peak system expected to rank around sixth in the world; the machine actually measured 190.90 TFlop/s Rmax and debuted 14th on the June 2009 TOP500 list (recorded here), by which point other systems had overtaken the pre-installation projection. KAUST's own retrospective (published alongside the Shaheen II launch, already in this dataset as shaheen-ii) independently confirms the 2009 date, the 191 TFlop/s figure and the rank-14 result. It last appeared on TOP500 in June 2015 at rank 411 with an unchanged Rmax, indicating it ran the same configuration for its full service life before Shaheen II (Cray XC40, March 2015) took over as KAUST's flagship; no source found gives an exact decommissioning date for the Blue Gene/P hardware itself.

Timeline

2008-09 Announced source
2009 First operational source
2009-06 List debut at #14 (June 2009) source

Public list appearances

Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.

#14: TOP500, June 2009 →

Site & facility

KAUST Supercomputing Core Lab

Location: Thuwal, Saudi Arabia
Cooling: Direct liquid cooling
Commissioned: 2009

hpc.kaust.edu.sa

Change history

2026-09-24 Shaheen added

Source check

We fetched this system's own citations and recorded whether each page actually mentions it. This is a corroboration signal, not a fact check, and it is published so you can see how well the sourcing holds up rather than take it on trust.

Cited source	Result	Found on the page
eurekalert.org	names system only	· counts: 65536
kaust.edu.sa	names system only	-

Checked 2026-10-09 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.