Saudi Arabia is building a supercomputer that could rank among the 10 most powerful systems in the world. And the country isn’t stopping there.

It has plans to turn this marquee system for the Middle East into a petascale system in two years, and beyond that, an exascale system.

The move represents a big leap for Saudi Arabia and the region generally, which, despite massive oil wealth, has not had much of an impact on IT, except as consumers.

But Saudi Arabia is turning its oil wealth in a new direction. This supercomputer, which is being built by IBM, will be located at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), a research university that was announced in 2007 and is due to open in September 2009.

A data center that will house the supercomputer will be completed next summer.

"The best thing about KAUST is we have no legacy systems and no legacy thinking," Majid Al-Ghaslan, the university’s interim CIO, told Computerworld.

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