SA's Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) will receive a $1.6 million supercomputer, donated by IBM in the second half of this year.
According to Sibusiso Sibisi, president and CEO of the CSIR, IBM's Blue Gene/P will be managed by the Meraka Institute, at the Centre for High-Performance Computing (CHPC), in Cape Town. The institute will lend it to universities and governments in need of its massive processing abilities.
"Since the announcement of the Blue Gene donation, much background activity has been taking place," he notes.
Sibisi says the CHPC is in the process of building a server room to house Blue Gene, and partners are in discussions around procedures and policies that will determine what projects will run on the machine.
No technical specifications for the model SA will be receiving are available. However, according to IBM, the general specifications show the system is capable of making 14 trillion calculations per second. It will reportedly be the most powerful supercomputer on the continent to be used for scientific research.
"The CSIR envisaged to ensure it promotes research collaboration around the African continent," says Sibisi.
IBM VP for research Dr Mark Dean says the donation forms part of IBM's Global Innovation Outlook on Africa.
"While a Blue Gene system has massive computational capacity, it is the opportunity to partner with the CSIR and the CHPC, and particularly to think this initiative could ultimately help in some way with food production, or disease control, or minerals beneficiation in Africa, that really excites IBM," says Dean.
"Access to the computer will be free of charge to any qualifying African institution. Its aim is to support computational research that has potential for positive social or economic outcomes for Africa," he adds.
SA's Blue Gene is being assembled in the US and will be shipped to SA in the second half of this year.
Internally, the Blue Gene/P contains a variant of the PowerPC 450 family of chips and will run at 850MHz.
Blue Gene/P has been listed second in the Top 500 supercomputers running in the world. This system was installed in Germany at the Forschungszentrum Juelich, where it reportedly achieved performance of 167.3TFlop/s. Four processor cores reside on a chip.
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