David Keyes

December 2025

• 

  KAUST researchers define the emerging field of high-performance statistical computing (HPSC)

  4 min read · Sun, Dec 14 2025

  News

  exascale GPU HPC mixed-precision computing Statistical computing

  KAUST researchers outline a new discipline for statistical computing at supercomputing scale.

October 2025

• 

  KAUST alumna Dr. Rabab Alomairy wins prestigious IEEE CS TCHPC Early Career Researchers Award

  3 min read · Wed, Oct 22 2025

  Awards News

  HPC

  KAUST alumna and Ibn Rushd Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Rabab Alomairy received the IEEE CS Early Career Researchers Award in HPC, becoming the first Middle Eastern and one of the youngest recipients professionally to earn this distinction in the award’s decade-long history.

July 2025

• 

  KAUST startup Saee delivers logistics innovation, reflecting University’s entrepreneurial impact

  1 min read · Thu, Jul 24 2025

  News Clip News

  From KAUST to acquisition by Estimkan, Saee’s journey underscores research-based entrepreneurship advancing national innovation.

November 2024

• 

  KAUST wins the “Nobel” of high-performance computing for climate modeling

  1 min read · Fri, Nov 22 2024

  News Clip News

  HPC climate projections extreme computing computational simulations uncertainty quantification

  KAUST has been awarded the “Nobel" prize of high-performance computing—the ACM Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling—in partnership with the NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research, U.S. and other partner institutions.

August 2024

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  KAUST researchers earn dual Bell finalist selections

  1 min read · Thu, Aug 1 2024

  News Clip Awards

  KAUST has achieved a historic double finalist selection for the ACM Gordon Bell Prize and the ACM Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modeling, recognizing two innovative research projects in collaboration with global partners that demonstrate the power of interdisciplinary teamwork in high-performance computing and climate science.

July 2024

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  KAUST team selected as ACM Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling finalists

  4 min read · Tue, Jul 23 2024

  News

  A new exascale climate emulator marks a significant advancement as the first to generate, display and evaluate hourly emulations. This breakthrough secured an interdisciplinary research team from KAUST, working alongside the NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research in the U.S. and other partner institutions, a spot as a finalist for the prestigious Gordon Bell Prize in Climate Modelling.

February 2024

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  KAUST’s Shaheen III confirmed as the Middle East’s most powerful supercomputer

  2 min read · Wed, Feb 7 2024

  News

  TOP500, the definitive voice of supercomputer statistics, has today confirmed King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) operates the Middle East’s most powerful supercomputer, Shaheen III, with key details about its capabilities revealed at SC23, the international conference for supercomputing. Shaheen III is also ranked 20th in the world rankings. Built by the world’s leading supercomputer provider, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Shaheen III is about six times faster than KAUST’s existing Shaheen II system, with its processing power exceeds that of 500,000 latest

October 2023

• 

  KAUST celebrates 5000 days of education and research

  2 min read · Tue, Oct 10 2023

  News

  KAUST: Pushing the Frontiers of Science and Technology

May 2023

• 

  Compress to impress with AI hardware

  2 min read · Thu, May 18 2023

  News

  Scientists can speed up simulations of complex systems by using compression algorithms running on AI hardware.

October 2022

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  A predictive eye on the prize

  3 min read · Sun, Oct 16 2022

  Awards News

  HPC weather forecast climate science

  Climate prediction models have had a mathematical makeover that has won attention from a computer science award.

September 2022

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  Designing Tomorrow's Algorithms on Today's Architectures: a Case Study with Stencil Computations Using AMD 3D V-Cache™ Technology

  2 min read · Mon, Sep 12 2022

  News

  HPC Performance optimization seismic imaging

  Regular stencil computations constitute the main core kernel in many temporally explicit approaches for structured grid finite-difference, finite-volume, and finite-element discretizations of partial differential equation conservation laws. For various blocking dimensions, the Spatial Blocking (SB) approach enables data reuse within multiple cache levels. However, the straightforward generalization of SB to manycore architectures, with each core owning an exclusive share of cache may leave performance on the table. The next two figures show the typical 25-point 3D star stencil used in seismic

August 2022

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  A model for millions of locations

  1 min read · Tue, Aug 23 2022

  News

  climate change Environmental Statistics modeling statistics

  CEMSE statisticians developed a framework which enables modeling of a range of meteorological and environmental datasets from up to 2 million locations globally.

May 2022

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  Code of collaboration

  2 min read · Thu, May 26 2022

  News

  seismic imaging big data

  David Keyes's and Matteo Ravasi's cross-disciplinary project results in improved efficiency for seismic processing, with promising applications for the energy industry.

July 2021

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  Mixing precision for model acceleration

  1 min read · Mon, Jul 26 2021

  News

  extreme computing supercomputing big data statistics

  A mixed-precision approach for modeling large geospatial datasets can achieve benchmark accuracy with a fraction of the computational run time.

March 2021

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  The Arab World Prepares the Exascale Workforce

  1 min read · Tue, Mar 23 2021

  News

  High Performance Computing computational science and engineering

  The April 2021 Communications of the ACM special section on computing in the Arab world features an article by ECRC Director and KAUST founding dean David Keyes on preparing the exascale workforce. Keyes muses on the lure of hands-on opportunities to resolve today’s application-architecture tension with innovative algorithms for recruiting students, and he follows the placement of a dozen recent ECRC doctoral students from the MENA region in the US exascale computing project and Saudi industry. For them, “graduation” means an upgrade to a more powerful computer :-). Several have also seen

February 2021

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  ECRC contributions to SIAM CSE21

  4 min read · Sat, Feb 27 2021

  News

  research conference HPC computational science and engineering

  ECRC @ SIAM CSE21! Follow us @KAUST_ECRC As in previous SIAM conferences on Parallel Processing (PP) and Computational Science and Engineering (CSE), ECRC members and their collaborators will have a strong presence at SIAM CSE21, nominally in Fort Worth, Texas, but held virtually due to the pandemic. ************************************************** SIAM CSE21 will run virtually with live sessions. ************************************************** Registration to SIAM CSE is required to gain access to the online platform and attend live sessions. Once registered, please use your personal

November 2020

• 

  Keep the data coming

  1 min read · Mon, Nov 9 2020

  News

  big data extreme computing applied mathematics computational science

  A continuous data supply ensures data-intensive simulations can run at maximum speed.

September 2020

• 

  H2Opus: a Performance-Oriented Library for Hierarchical Matrices

  1 min read · Wed, Sep 16 2020

  News

  GPU Computing High Performance Computing numerical linear algebra

  H2Opus: a Performance-Oriented Library for Hierarchical Matrices Download at https://github.com/ecrc/h2opus. Experience our latest HPC software release that implements H 2-Matrix operations on shared-memory systems, possibly equipped with GPU hardware accelerators. The prime target applications for H2Opus are PDE-constrained optimizations. The features of H2Opus include: Generation of matrix structure from a point set and admissibility condition, Construction of a hierarchical matrix given a kernel function, Matrix-vector and matrix-multiple-vector multiplication, Basis orthogonalization
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  Turning your desktop to a Supercomputer with ExaGeoStatR

  1 min read · Mon, Sep 7 2020

  News

  Maximum Likelihood HPC Environmental Statistics

  Turning your desktop to a Supercomputer with ExaGeoStatR Download at https://github.com/ecrc/exageostatR. Remember the old times where you had to leave your R simulations running for the whole night on your desktop due to a large climate/weather dataset? ExaGeoStatR combines the user productivity of R with high performance computing linear algebra software libraries to deliver supercomputing-style environment right below your desk. ExaGeoStatR enables computing the maximum likelihood using large environmental datasets on R, while extracting performance from the underlying hardware resources

August 2020

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  Tariq receives his best paper award at EuroPar'2020

  1 min read · Thu, Aug 27 2020

  News

  High Performance Computing GPU Computing burst buffer scientific computing Parallel and Distributed Computing

  Maximizing I/O Bandwidth for Out-of-Core HPC Applications on Heterogeneous Large-Scale Systems Best Paper Presentation by Tariq Alturkestani PhD Student, Computer Science, KAUST Thursday, Aug 27, 3:30pm - 4:00pm (AST) https://zoom.us/j/99947879910 Tariq will present his best paper at EuroPar'2020 at the virtual EuroPar'2020 conference in Warsaw, Poland. The reverse time migration (RTM) method is critical in seismic imaging for oil and gas industries. He demonstrates the effectiveness of his Multilayer Buffer System (MLBS) framework on Shaheen-2 (using 2048 compute nodes) and Summit

July 2020

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  Keyes and colleagues take part in historic ISC

  1 min read · Tue, Jul 14 2020

  News

  International Supercomputing Conference

  KAUST Professor David Keyes, director of the KAUST Extreme Computing Research Center (ECRC) and professor of applied mathematics and computational science, chaired this year's International Supercomputing Conference (ISC). The ISC, which takes place in Frankfurt, Germany every June, is where the world's supercomputers are re-ranked for computational power, power efficiency, and performance on various scientific benchmarks.
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  Prof. Keyes opening virtually the ISC event

  1 min read · Tue, Jul 14 2020

  News

  International Supercomputing Conference research conference

  Prof. Keyes and team successfully run virtually the ISC event: catch up on the opening session below! Read the full article here.
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  PhD Defense of Tariq AlTurkestani

  1 min read · Sun, Jul 5 2020

  News

  PhD Defense HPC scientific computing parallel simulations Parallel and Distributed Computing

  Maximizing I/O Bandwidth for Out-of-Core HPC Applications on Heterogeneous Large-Scale Systems PhD Dissertation Defense by Tariq Alturkestani PhD Student, Computer Science Thursday, July 9, 16:00 - 17:00, https://kaust.zoom.us/j/94054511362 Contact Person: Tariq Alturkestani The execution rate of floating-point operations has typically increased by an order of magnitude every four years during the last 30 years of modern comput ing. This exponential growth in terms of computational power has benefited from the hardware technology scaling. However, memory and storage systems have not maintained

June 2020

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  KAUST scientists win prestigious Gauss Award for supercomputing excellence

  2 min read · Fri, Jun 26 2020

  News

  HPC supercomputing numerical linear algebra parallel computing

  KAUST Ph.D. graduate Dr. Noha Al-Harthi and doctoral student Rabab Alomairy, have won the German Gauss Center for Supercomputing (GCS) Award for original research that best advances high-performance computing. This makes KAUST the first Middle Eastern institution to receive this prestigious award.

May 2020

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  Shaheen II open to serve COVID-19 research around the Kingdom

  1 min read · Sun, May 10 2020

  News

  supercomputing

  The COVID-19 pandemic has imposed challenges across the globe that need to be solved using scientific discovery and innovation. In line with that, the KAUST Supercomputing Core Laboratory (KSL) has opened a call for proposals that require its supercomputer Shaheen II, as well as other cluster computing resources, to support research projects.

February 2020

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  Pop stats for big geodata

  1 min read · Mon, Feb 24 2020

  News

  climate change statistics

  A universal high-performance computing interface allows popular statistical tools to run efficiently on large geospatial datasets.

May 2019

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  KAUST Professor David Keyes to chair International Supercomputing Conference 2020

  1 min read · Mon, May 20 2019

  Spotlight News

  supercomputing conference

  David Keyes, KAUST professor of applied mathematics and computational science; director of the University's Extreme Computing Research Center; and senior associate to the President of KAUST, will chair the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) 2020. He will be the first program chair from a Middle Eastern institution, as announced by ISC 2020.
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  Cutting datasets down to size

  1 min read · Thu, May 16 2019

  News

  applied mathematics computational science statistics environment

  A powerful statistical tool could significantly reduce the burden of analyzing very large datasets.

February 2019

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  AAAS honors KAUST Professor David Keyes as elected Fellow

  1 min read · Thu, Feb 28 2019

  Awards Spotlight

  award

  KAUST Professor David Keyes has been elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world's largest general scientific society. Keyes was honored for fundamental research contributions at the interface of parallel computing and numerical analysis and his service to the mathematical sciences profession. The Fellows, announced on November 27, 2018, were recognized during the week of February 18 at the AAAS Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., where they received an official certificate and the AAAS Fellows' gold and blue rosette pin, the colors of which
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  Soren Wolfers succesfully defended his PhD Thesis

  2 min read · Thu, Feb 7 2019

  News

  I​n the field of uncertainty quantification, the effects of parameter uncertainties on scientific simulations may be studied by integrating or approximating a quantity of interest as a function over the parameter space. If this is done numerically, using regular grids with a fixed resolution, the required computational work increases exponentially with respect to the number of uncertain parameters - a phenomenon known as the curse of dimensionality.

November 2018

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  Next generation algorithm advances machine learning of powerful supercomputers

  1 min read · Tue, Nov 13 2018

  News

  supercomputing

  A multi-disciplinary team of international researchers from KAUST and Japan's National Institute of Informatics (NII) in collaboration with U.S. supercomputer company Cray Inc. successfully implemented a new algorithm to efficiently harness the computational power of the fastest supercomputers in the world. "Software integration is ultimately the icing on the cake for advanced computational projects. Thanks to Cray's support, our algorithms are now deployed on all Cray supercomputers, including KAUST's Shaheen II supercomputer, as well as half of the top 10 fastest supercomputers in the world

October 2018

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  Solving the grandest of challenges

  1 min read · Tue, Oct 30 2018

  News

  energy nuclear fission ITER KAUST

  Around the world, scientists, researchers and engineers seek to develop sustainable alternatives to the burning of fossil fuels. Some explore the kinetic energy of wind, gravity or water. Others capture excited electrons using photosensitive materials. William Tang, a principal research physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory at Princeton University, wants to power the world using the chemical reaction that stars run on—nuclear fusion—and he believes deep learning is a key.
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  Award-winning algorithm takes search for habitable planets to the next level

  1 min read · Tue, Oct 16 2018

  News

  telescope astronomy NVIDIA PASC singular-value-decomposition-MOAO

  An international team of scientists, including KAUST high performance computing experts and astronomers from the Paris Observatory and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), in collaboration with NVIDIA, is taking the search for habitable planets and observation of first epoch galaxies to the next level.
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  KAUST gets ready for SC18

  1 min read · Mon, Oct 8 2018

  News

  supercomputing High Performance Computing

  For the past 10 years, KAUST has made a strong presence at the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC) that takes place in different cities around the U.S. every year. 2018 will mark a special year for KAUST at SC, which will take place in Dallas, Texas, in November, with around 13,000 supercomputing professionals in attendance. The University will have an engaging presence on the exhibition floor and in the seminars, and the technical program of SC18 will be chaired by the Director of the KAUST Extreme Computing Research Center (ECRC)

August 2018

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  Award-winning algorithm aids observation

  1 min read · Mon, Aug 27 2018

  News

  astronomy telescope extreme computing

  Researchers at the Extreme Computing Research Center (ECRC) at KAUST have developed a new algorithm that uses supervised machine learning to control a small high-speed deformable mirror inside the exoplanet imaging camera to compensate for atmospheric turbulence in the Subaru Telescope, which has an 8.2 meter diameter.

July 2018

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  Superior seismic imaging for better drilling

  1 min read · Sun, Jul 8 2018

  News

  seismic imaging fossil fuels extreme computing data analysis

  Software could transform underground imaging of fossil fuel reserves by providing unprecedented detail in record time.

February 2018

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  Pulling rank on spatial statistics

  1 min read · Sun, Feb 18 2018

  News

  High Performance Computing statistics

  A technique that uses the power of computing could solve statistical problems cheaper and faster than current methods.

April 2017

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  KAUST Research Conference: Predictive Complex Computational Fluid Dynamics 2017

  2 min read · Mon, Apr 3 2017

  News

  computational fluid dynamics multi-scale complex flow simulations

  KAUST will host the 2017 Research Conference "Predictive Complex Computational Fluid Dynamics " on May 22-24, 2017. The Research Conference aims to gather international top scientists of all ages from academia and industry and will focus on cutting-edge research in the field of algorithmic development for CFD and multi-scale complex flow simulations. Although CFD is arguably the oldest area of computational science, it is a very challenging and active one, due to to the fact that worldwide research centers, in the private and public sector, are still actively working on the development and application of CFD algorithms to supplement experiment and to interpolate between experimental scenarios. CFD is currently being applied to scenarios where physical experiments are not feasible due to prohibitive costs, and ethical concerns, or where reproducibility is impossible to achieve.

March 2017

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  Signaling success for 5th gen communications

  1 min read · Sat, Mar 4 2017

  News

  applied mathematics mobile

  An efficient wireless signal optimization scheme achieves peak performance for next-generation mobile communications.

January 2017

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  New cost-effective GPUs solver redesigns the computational game

  2 min read · Thu, Jan 12 2017

  News

  exascale High Performance Computing parallel computing

  Prof. David Keyes and his team proposed a GPUs light architecture to solve systems of multiple equations involving a large amount of data. Broadly used in computer gaming, mobile, and PC graphics - GPUs allow customizing an effective result-driven support to create a computational framework for increasing the number of processors while reducing the memory required to temporarily store the data.
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  Taking graphics cards beyond gaming

  1 min read · Mon, Jan 9 2017

  News

  graphic card computing applied mathematics computational science

  A highly efficient mathematical solver designed to run on graphics processors gives scientists and engineers a powerful new tool for a common computational problem.

December 2016

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  CEMSE Big Data Open Day shows off fascinating discoveries

  4 min read · Thu, Dec 8 2016

  News

  big data machine learning knowledge discovery supercomputing

  The fifth-anniversary event marked CEMSE's biggest successes and featured 20 KAUST discoveries, with more than 1,000 visitors from the community attending the event."Big data has many applications: to understand medicine better; to manage food supplies, and to connect objects. Data is at the center of everything," said Dean Mootaz Elnozahy of the University's Computer, Electrical, Mathematical Science and Engineering (CEMSE) Division at the CEMSE Big Data Open Day held on December 4, 2016.

January 2016

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  Arias and Art Songs for Guests of SRI-UQ

  3 min read · Wed, Jan 6 2016

  News

  Guests of the January 2016 Uncertainty Quantification Applications Workshop (UQAW) had to check whether they were truly at a science and technology university in Saudi Arabia, or had perhaps taken a wrong turn en route to the poster session and reception in the KAUST University Library on the evening of 6 January. Director Raul Tempone invited them, drinks and hors d’ouvres in hand, to a piano at the entrance to the poster atrium, where Electrical Engineering PhD candidate Itsikiantsoa Randrianantenaina, from Madagascar, and Applied Mathematics Professor David Keyes, from New York City, were

April 2015

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  Taking computing to the next level

  2 min read · Sat, Apr 25 2015

  News

  supercomputing data wrap applied mathematics computational science

  KAUST’s new supercomputer will enable ground-breaking scientific modeling and analysis in Saudi Arabia and worldwide.

September 2014

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  5 Year Anniversary Showcase

  1 min read · Wed, Sep 3 2014

  News

  There were over 15 faculty members that helped, dedicated there time, and worked together to create an experience that everyone could enjoy. With effort, creativity, passion, collaboration, and dedication these faculty members made this whole event possible!