Cray announced today that it has been awarded an $80 million contract to provide Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah University of Science and Technology with a range of high-performance computing products. KAUST is a growing graduate-level research institution that’s based in Thuwal, Saudi Arabia.
The company is on the hook to provide one of its new XC40 supercomputers outfitted with DataWarp technology. The supercomputer, known as Shaheen II, will be 25 times faster than the university’s current system. The contract also includes a Sonexion 2000 storage system, along with a Tiered Adaptive Storage system to manage data transfer between the Sonexion and the XC40’s DataWarp storage.
What’s more, Cray will also provide a Urika-GD graph analytics appliance, which is tailor-built to automate the process of discovering patterns and relationships in large data sets.
It has been more than 20 years since Cray last worked in the Middle East. That’s a good sign for the company, which is trying to expand its business in the face of an ever-changing computing market that’s being shaped by the cloud. Today’s news comes on the heels of a strong third quarter earnings report, in which the company posted nearly triple the revenues it brought in during the same period in 2013. It also follows a $128 million contract that Cray recently won from the U.K. weather agency.
Shares of Cray are down just over one percent today.
