A supercomputer, which will assist local researchers to find cures for SA's most devastating diseases, was yesterday switched on at the CSIR.
The supercomputer was provided to the CSIR's Meraka Institute by Intel and is designed to assist HIV and AIDS research in SA.
Intel chairman Craig Barrett, who was in SA for the launch, as well as the handover of computers to a school, healthcare centre and informal trader in Bela Bela, says the machine will "push the limits of scientific discovery to accelerate the creation of treatments and cures".
Created by Intel and HP, the supercomputer was promised to the CSIR by Barrett a year ago. The machine uses a cluster of 32 dual-processor servers with Itanium 2 processors, 32 dual-processor servers with Xeon processors, and a Red Hat Linux Advanced Server. The system, theoretically, performs at a peak of 870 billion floating point operations per second (gigaFLOP/s).
"This supercomputer provides a scalable solution that can help accelerate finding a cure for harsh diseases by handling complex, data-intensive processing for experiments measuring tens of thousands of data points in hundreds of thousands of samples," says deputy minister of science and technology Derek Hanekom.
These data points and samples would have taken hundreds of man-years to process, Barrett adds.
The research cluster will be available to bio-informaticists all over the country. Intel will train the bio-informaticists to use the machine and Swiss research house Vital IT will provide its files and software tools to help make the cluster more efficient.
Meraka Institute director Johan Eksteen says the institute is looking at linking up to other projects worldwide. "This supercomputer brings us into the global knowledge-generating pool, because we now have the tools and skills to participate."
Says Barrett: "The rising spread of communicable diseases threatens SA's livelihood and economy. This high-performance computing system will push the limits of scientific discovery to accelerate the creation of treatments and cures."
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