The opening of the Centre for High-Performance Computing (CHPC), in Cape Town, is the start of bringing massive computing power to South African academic institutions, says centre manager Llewellyn Jones.
Installed by IBM, the R10 million centre comprises 160 nodes, or 640 AMD processors, in a clustered architecture, and is now fully-operational.
The system is rated to have a peak performance of 2.5 teraflops (2.5 million mathematical operations every second), and has 50 terabytes of storage space.
The second phase will go out to tender later this year, and Jones says this would in all probability be far larger than the current installation.
"The roll-out of high-performance computing is not going to stop here. We are already having a number of discussions with other interested parties, such as the pebble-bed modular reactor (the proposed new nuclear station technology) and mining houses that need such computing power."
He says the CHPC will continue to expand with computing nodes set up in other locations, apart from Cape Town, and bandwidth issues would be solved through the establishment of government`s new broadband supplier, Infraco.
"We are not really worried about bandwidth issues now."
Open source
Jones says CHPC is probably the first high-performance computing centre in the country, if not the world, to use the Ubuntu Linux operating system.
"It is not just a matter of cost that we are using Ubuntu, but it meets our needs. While we will have to use some specific proprietary packages, we will always keep our eyes open for other open source systems."
Flagship projects using the CHPC facilities include a multi-model season climate forecast conducted by the University of Cape Town, a North West University project on cosmology, and a Limpopo University study on lithium-ion batteries.
Jones says it is expected that about a third of the CHPC would be used for commercial projects and the remainder on academic projects.
The CHPC is run jointly through the University of Cape Town and the Meraka Institute, which is part of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research.
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