New Way Now: How KAUST accelerates research with on-demand AI power

Learn about: → Compute Engine: https://goo.gle/4pQ4okK → Vertex AI: https://goo.gle/44BZwaE → Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE): https://goo.gle/3MVr8RR → Cloud Storage: https://goo.gle/4qo5KmD → Cloud Monitoring: https://goo.gle/3NgpWsk → Cloud Logging: https://goo.gle/4pdo3dB Featured in this video: Mohamed Abdel-Aal, Chief Information Officer at KAUST Marco Canini, Professor of Computer Science at KAUST Executive summary: King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) is a graduate research university focused on science and technology with global impact. To support its research and education mission, KAUST uses Google Cloud to give faculty and students fast access to the compute and AI resources they need. With elastic GPUs, managed ML tools, and scalable infrastructure, KAUST can run larger experiments, reproduce results more reliably, and accelerate scientific breakthroughs across disciplines. Challenge: Traditional on-prem infrastructure required long procurement cycles and manual setup, slowing down researchers who needed resources quickly. Limited capacity and queue times made it difficult to run large experiments, support diverse workloads, or reproduce results across student teams. Solution: Google Cloud gives KAUST on-demand access to advanced AI infrastructure. Researchers can spin up Compute Engine A3 VMs with NVIDIA H100 GPUs in minutes, use Vertex AI for managed training jobs, and run multi-node workloads on GKE. Standard images, notebooks, and cost guardrails make it simple for teams to launch experiments quickly, maintain data locality when needed, and scale workloads without operational overhead. Results: KAUST’s researchers can now access the compute they need instantly, without waiting for on-prem capacity. Teams run advanced AI workloads more reliably, reproduce results at scale, and complete large experiments with far less operational overhead. This cloud-first approach accelerates research across the university and helps stude