Saudi research centre picks Oracle Cloud to run Covid-19 experiments

Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah International Medical Research Centre (KAIMRC) has chosen Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to provide high-performance computing (HPC) to run its research into a potential treatment for Covid-19 and other infectious diseases.

Conducting such research requires advanced protein analysis and simulation tools, and powerful computing resources required to run advanced applications smoothly and efficiently.

KAIMRC is already equipped with advanced medical laboratories, and solutions to conduct advanced DNA analysis, protein analysis and simulation tools. However, due to the urgent need for therapeutics, the priority of the project, and the large volume of research data being created concerning Covid-19, KAIMRC decided to secure more computing power than its existing on-premise high-performance computing could provide.

KAIMRC can now tap into Oracle for Research, which provides scientists, researchers, and university innovators with Oracle Cloud technologies, participation in Oracle research user community, and access to Oracle’s technical support network.

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Oracle team in Saudi Arabia designed the computing environment for KAIMRC, which combined HPC, networking and storage, all supplied from Oracle’s cloud region in Saudi Arabia.

“Oracle was able to meet our needs to quickly expand our computational power, in line with the high demands of the Covid-19 projects, and we have been able to accelerate our research and run many more clinical trials, to develop more options on how to tackle COVID-19 and future pandemics,” said Dr.Lamya Alomair, AI and Bioinformatics Head, KAIMRC.

“As a government agency, we require all of our data to be residing in Saudi Arabia, so the fact that we could access all the resources we needed from Oracle’s cloud region in Jeddah was another important factor in our decision to work with Oracle to power this important research,” he added.

Oracle Cloud supports various HPC workloads, including CFD, crash, computer-aided design (CAE), electronic design automation (EDA), VFX rendering, reservoir simulations, and AI training/Inference.

“This project demonstrates how Oracle [was able to] to equip KAIMRC with the tools its scientists and researchers needed to tackle this urgent problem and to support their future research into solutions to advance the health and wellbeing of the population of the kingdom,” said Fahad Al Turief, country leader, Oracle Saudi Arabia.

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