Saudi Arabia plans to build a petascale supercomputer system in two years that could rank among the 10 most powerful systems in the world, and beyond that, an exascale system (1000 times as fast as petascale).

Code-named Shaheen (Peregrine Falcon), it is being built by IBM, based on the Blue Gene/P System, and will intially run at 222 teraflops. It will be located at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, due to open in 2009.

Saudi Arabia plans to conduct research for its oil industry.