At the 2019 Supercomputing Conference in Denver, Colorado, Cray announced that the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia has selected a Cray CS-Storm 500NX supercomputer to support innovation in the university and the nation through a strategic artificial intelligence (AI) initiative. The added power of the GPU-accelerated CS-Storm system provides KAUST researchers greater computational capabilities to drive positive and significant outcomes in the university’s core research areas of global significance: food, water, energy, the environment, and digitalization. From helping to build smart cities to developing AI algorithms that think like scientists, KAUST is the largest research center in the Middle East that brings together faculty, researchers and graduate students to leverage the interconnectedness of science and engineering. With an 8:2 ratio of GPUs to CPUs, the new Cray CS-Storm 500NX supercomputer will meet KAUST’s most demanding computing requirements for production scalability, while also delivering a low total cost of ownership. Engineered for the convergence of modeling, simulation and analytics, the CS-Storm fast-started KAUST’s AI journey and provides researchers and scientists the highly-advanced supercomputing and software capabilities required to analyze large volumes of data for rapid insight, where simulation alone is unsatisfactory for predicting real-world outcomes. The Cray CS-Storm 500NX enables larger models and faster results for AI and deep learning neural network training. The system uses NVLink technology to tightly couple the NVIDIA GPUs together, providing a high-speed interconnect that enables ultra-fast communication between the GPUs, and allowing data rates at 5 to 12 times faster than traditional PCIe Gen3. KAUST’s new system will feature NVIDIA V100 Tensor Core GPUs, 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors and the Mellanox ConnectX-6 HDR-100 Dual-Port VPI adapter.