Saudi Arabia’s leading medical research facility turns to high performance computing solutions provided by Oracle’s second-generation cloud region in Jeddah

Riyadh, 12 November 2020: Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah International Medical Research Center (KAIMRC), one of the leading biomedical and clinical research institutions has chosen Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to provide high performance computing (HPC) to power its complex research into a potential treatment for COVID-19 and other infectious diseases.

“At KAIMRC, one of our strategic goals is to conduct advanced medical research focusing on complex health problems, and in line with this, we started analyzing the protein structures of SARS-CoV-2 in March 2020. Understanding the genome of the SARS-CoV-2 required analysis of protein strands, and by analyzing structural and nonstructural proteins in the virus recreating the protein strands in the virus, researchers globally hope to identify potential drug compounds that can be used to combat the virus”, said Dr. Ahmed Alaskar, Executive Director, KAIMRC.

Conducting such research requires advanced protein analysis and simulation tools, and powerful computing resources required to run advanced applications smoothly and efficiently. KAIMRC is well-equipped with advanced medical laboratories, and solutions to conduct the advanced DNA analysis, protein analysis and simulation tools, however, due to the urgent need of therapeutics, priority of the project, and large volume of research data being created in relation to COVID-19, KAIMRC decided to secure more computing power than our existing on-premise high-performance computing.

“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. 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,” added Dr.Lamya Alomair , AI and Bioinformatics Head, KAIMRC.

KAIMRC worked closely with 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. Additionally, Oracle’s Saudi Arabia team helped identify all the resources needed for this complex research project.  The Oracle team designed the computing environment for KAIMRC, which combined HPC, networking and storage, all supplied from Oracle’s cloud region in Saudi Arabia. 

“We are very proud to have been able to support KAIMRC in its research to tackle COVID-19. This project demonstrates how Oracle, working closely with KAIMRC, was able to quickly develop and deploy a highly advanced computing environment to support the complex needs of the research, 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 – Saudi Arabia, Oracle. 

Customers are reinventing how they develop products, measure risk, deliver experiences, and revolutionize their industries using Oracle’s HPC solutions. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s HPC services uniquely provide bare-metal compute instances, low latency cluster networks with RDMA, high performance distributed storage solutions, and network traffic isolation to automate and help run jobs seamlessly in the cloud. Oracle Cloud supports the full array of HPC workloads, including CFD, crash, computer-aided design (CAE), electronic design automation (EDA), VFX rendering, reservoir simulations, and AI training/Inference.