South Africa is celebrating 10 years of high performance computing in the country since the launch of the Centre of High Performance Computing (CHPC) in 2007.
Since its introduction in the 1960s, high performance computing (also called supercomputing) has made enormous contribution to scientific, engineering and industrial competitiveness, as well as to homeland security and other government missions.
Supercomputers have already made cars and planes much safer, more fuel efficient and environmentally friendly. They are crucial aids in discovering and extracting new sources of oil and gas, and for developing alternative energy sources. They have enabled the weather community to create more accurate predictions of severe storms that can devastate lives and property. They are heavily relied by industries ranging from financial services to medicine and health care, entertainment, consumer products, and more recently by Internet companies.
In short, high performance computing has become indispensable in maintaining security and economic competitiveness.
In a space of 10 years, scientists at the CHPC – hosted by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research – have managed to build a fastest computer in Africa named Lengau which is a Setswana for Cheetah. This computer has already improved South Africa’s competitiveness in the research and development space globally. Lengau is ranked 121 on world’s Top 500 list of supercomputers.
“The launch of supercomputing facility in South Africa is evidence of our determination to be globally competitive in certain areas of science, and of the competence of South African scientists and engineers to develop, implement and maintain such cutting-edge technologies”, says Dr Happy Sithole, Director at the CHPC.
The computer gives scientists an opportunity to conduct their research locally without having to travel abroad for higher performance computing infrastructure.
“High Performance Computing has grown tremendously since its inception. When we started, there were about 50 users across the country but over the years it has increased to over 700 users. More so, these systems have also been integrated into universities thus improving skills for students”, adds Sithole.
In 2012 the centre introduced the Student Cluster Competition as a component of its Winter School. South Africa has won the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) Student Cluster Challenge thrice i(2013, 2014 and 2016) and coming second only in 2015. The students who have come through this program have gained a good understanding of HPC and have become a source of young talent for growing the HPC industry in the country and continent as a whole.
For the country to grow at the required rate as set out in the National Development Plan (NDP), it needs to change gear building capacity in the production and knowledge dissemination. The CHPC represents a deliberate move by this country to invest in modern research and development.
“High Performance Computing has been put to good use in research in climate modelling, thus we are able to make reliable and accurate weather forecasting as well as process data fast. There has also been in tackling challenges in the health systems as well as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA)”, concludes Sithole.
