The current CHPC office on the CSIR Rosebank campus in Cape Town.

The South African Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) has concluded a R10 million contract with IBM, which will provide the technology to power the country's pioneering high performance computing (HPC) system for scientific research.

The CHPC is an intervention by the South African Department of Science and Technology (DST), which is aimed at addressing the computational requirements of the wider scientific community in South Africa. The Meraka - a national research centre of the CSIR - is responsible for the management of the CHPC. The initial node is hosted by the University of Cape Town (UCT) and physically located on the CSIR campus in Rosebank, Cape Town. IBM, with business partner Business Connexion, will deploy the first phase HPC system - a process that is expected to be completed in March next year.

What sets this contract apart from most others in the international scientific computing community is that, beyond the actual system that is being supplied, it includes a vast number of added benefits. These range from sponsorship for PhD fellowships, mentorship and internship opportunities for CHPC affiliates to code porting and optimisation services.

"We are very excited about this milestone in the establishment of a significant addition to South Africa's scientific infrastructure. It will enable skills development in the cutting-edge field of HPC, which in addition to enhancing our scientific outputs, will pose many downstream benefits for local industry and commerce. Together with the envisaged South African National Research Network (SANReN), the CHPC contributes to the cyberinfrastructure component of the national information and communications technology research and development strategy," says Dr Bethuel Sehlapelo, Group Executive: Frontier Science and Technology Programme, DST.

"We are pleased to take part in the establishment of South Africa's pioneering HPC system, which will benefit the country's scientific research community immensely. Today IBM leads the highly contested Top 500 list of global, cutting edge technology innovators, particularly power technology-based supercomputers, where its systems account for 237 of the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world and 49.6% of the total processing power," says Mark Harris, Managing Director of IBM, South Africa.

As part of the contract, IBM commits to contributing two IBM Unix (power 4) shared memory computers for training and development purposes; application domain focused research collaboration; access to IBM BlueGene, Cell and Deep Visualisation technologies; beta testing of other new and emerging technologies; and the establishment of ClearSpeed expertise at the CHPC.

The HPC system will feature, among other world-class technologies for scientific research, key technical characteristics such as 160 computer nodes in a clustered architecture with five standby nodes and a shared storage capacity of 50TB.

Source: CSIR

For more information, contact Biffy van Rooyen (CSIR) at 012 841 3887.