Countdown for high-performance bid winner

By Paul Vecchiatto, ITWeb Cape Town correspondent

Johannesburg, 23 Jul 2008

IBM, Hewlett Packard and Sun will know within two weeks who will be the preferred bidder for the R35 million contract to install a multi-terraflop system at the Center for High Performance Computing (CHPC).

CHPC director Happy Sithole says the these companies are the only ones that responded to the request for proposals that was issued last year, after the request for information which elicited a larger number of responses.

"What we are doing is arranging the three in order of preference with the first being the top of the list. We will then go into negotiations with the preferred bidder over the value adds, such as technology transfer, training and skills development that were not part of the original tender specifications," he says.

Sithole says this will constitute phase 2 of the CHPC's development that is aimed to extend the computing power and infrastructure that was part of the initial development.

Phase 1, which as worth R10 million, consists of an IBM-installed high-speed e1350 computer cluster, with 160 nodes, with an aggregate processing power of 2.5 terraflops per second.

"Essentially, what we want is a system that can process faster than the 2.5 terraflops per second that we already have. The new system is what we call a hybrid system with cluster functionality," Sithole says.

Working the box

He says IBM's donation of a Blue Gene 14 terraflop computer, worth $2 million (about R16 million) should be operational towards the end of October.

"IBM donated the box and now we have to operationalise it. It also has a different architecture to what we have already installed," Sithole says.

He says the centre is collaborating with an Egyptian university that has bought a Blue Gene computer and it is in line with government's overall policy of collaborative research on the African continent.

Sithole says the number of research groups using the CHPC's facilities has grown to 10 with the four original flagship projects still running and that industry has shown considerable interest in participating.

"We have decided to allocate 30% of our capacity for industrial use and the rest will remain for academic purposes," he says.