CT hosts Africa's most powerful computer

By Paul Vecchiatto, ITWeb Cape Town correspondent

Cape Town, 08 Oct 2008

IBM has donated some heavy metal to the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) in the form of a Blue Gene/P. This makes the Cape Town centre the host of the most powerful supercomputer in Africa.

Unveiled yesterday by deputy science and technology minister Derek Hanekom, the donation is the culmination of a joint effort between the Council for Science and Industrial Research, the CHPC, the Department of Science and Technology and IBM. The parties aim to enhance the centre's ability to supply supercomputing services to academia and industry.

The donation was prompted by a series of meetings on economic development in Africa, convened recently by IBM.

Blue Gene/P, the second generation of the series developed by IBM, is a 14-teraflop system. This gives it a capacity of more than six times of the other IBM system, an E1350, that was installed at the centre more than a year ago. This means the Blue Gene/P can perform 14 trillion floating-point calculations.

The computer has 1 024 nodes and each consists of four processors, making for a total of 4 096 processors in total.

Fast and green

The installation was project managed by IBM, and Business Connexion integrated the system, which included a Cisco switch.

George Reilly, a member of the IBM installation team, says the Blue Gene/P operates with a Linux-like kernel, which means it uses the open source system, but with a lot of proprietary technology.

“Thanks to the very efficient processors that do not generate a lot of heat, the machine is both 'green' and very fast,” Reilly says.

Terry Davis, a consultant with IBM's UK-based Storage Technology Group, has been seconded to develop the interface for the Blue Gene/P, with the objective of making it seamless with the previously installed E1350 system.

Davis says: “The trick is to join the two systems at the hip so that a user can decide if they want a job to be completed on one or the other machine, or to divide it between the two.”

The three technologies that Davis will have to integrate over the next three weeks will be the Global Parallel File System that is the method by which all the data is stored. The second is the Load Leveler, which is the job scheduler, and the Cluster System Management, which is the interface with the E1350.

Forecasting boost

Davis says the demand for supercomputing is increasing worldwide, with one of the most popular applications being weather forecasting.

“Weather forecasting, especially over small areas, is becoming very important to businesses. For instance, the weather pattern of a small town or suburb can influence what is stocked on the local supermarket shelves,” he says.

CHPC supercomputing facilities have already been used for a number of local industrial and academic studies.

The battery that powers the recently unveiled electric car, developed by Optimal Energy and funded by the Department of Science and Technology, was designed using the E1350 system at the centre.