DUBAI (Bloomberg) -- International Business Machines Corp., the world’s biggest computer-services company, signed a joint-research agreement with Saudi Arabia to build the fastest computer in the Middle East.

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, also known as Kaust, and IBM will “build and conduct research on the most complex, high-performance computing system in the region,” the two partners said in a joint statement.
The center will initially be located at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Laboratory in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., the parties said in the statement, which didn’t disclose financial terms.
Saudi Arabia is spending some of the $1 billion a day it receives from oil sales to improve higher education in the kingdom. Kaust is scheduled to open in September 2009 with a $10 billion endowment.