A security engineer from Security Audit and Control Solutions is embarking on a project to build SA's second 'supercomputer'.
Lohan Spies says he aims to build the Beowulf cluster supercomputer primarily for security and cryptography research, in order to find new solutions to prevent attacks.
He adds that in time the computer could become a "public supercomputer for South Africans, where people and institutes can use the space for scientific research".
Spies hopes large corporations will donate their old computer equipment to the initiative.
SA already has one supercomputer, owned by Telkom, which has a processing speed of 384-gigaflops (a measure of computing speed equal to one billion floating-point operations per second).
Spies plans to use an open source parallel operating system. He says the computer will initially be located in one city, but in time may have compartments linked from various places in SA.
He believes power consumption and bandwidth will be the major problems associated with the project, but with sponsorship assistance he hopes to make the supercomputer free to researchers.
Those interested in donating computers to the supercomputer project can e-mail Spies.
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