Africa's largest and fastest high-performance computing centre is being constructed in Cape Town. The South African Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC), an initiative by the Department of Science and Technology, aims to provide high-level computing power to the scientific community in SA.
Albert Gazendam, speaking on behalf of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research's (CSIR's) Meraka Institute, says the centre should be running in March 2007.
The centre, which has a R150 million budget until the end of 2008, aims to continue growing and evolving into a national grid of high-performance computing centres over the next few years.
Gazendam says should the centre prove its worth in terms of research, it would continue to receive funding. The national centre should be a facility that provides the "most powerful resource to SA's research community". The aim is to install new capacity every 18 months, he says, adding that this centre will be the most powerful centre in Africa.
Gazendam says pilot research projects will be identified and funded in time for the centre's opening. Of 10 proposed flagship projects, he says about three or four could be funded in the first cycle.
These projects range from biotechnology to materials science, and an examination on how a national grid of computing power can be implemented.
Step one
The CHPC on Friday said it had concluded the first phase of the contract, worth R10 million, with IBM and its local partner Business Connexion.
Mark Harris, MD of IBM in SA, said the company was "pleased to take part in the establishment of SA's pioneering high-performance computing system, which will immensely benefit the country's scientific research community".
In a statement, the CSIR said the system would initially feature 160 computer nodes in a clustered architecture and five standby nodes. Eight of the cluster nodes are equipped with ClearSpeed accelerator cards, while each cluster node is equipped with two dual-core AMD Opteron 2.6GHz Rev F processors.
In addition, each cluster node is equipped with 16GB of DDR2 667MHz random access memory and the cluster's high-speed interconnect is Infiniband 4X SDR via HTX, with equipment from Voltaire and PathScale; and the system features shared storage capacity of 50TB.
Step two
The centre, which is managed by the Meraka Institute, with its initial node hosted by the University of Cape Town, expects that phase two will come online halfway through 2008, says Gazendam.
The R150 million budget will fund phase one and phase two - expected to come in at about R50 million - as well as fund the research projects, infrastructure and operational expenditure.
Phase two, for which requests for proposals will be accepted in March next year, will increase the computing power. Is also expected to provide the country with "bang for its buck," says Gazendam. He adds that skills development in the high-performance and computing science arena is an important add-on to any tender.
However, the centre will learn from the first phase and use this to inform its requirements on the second phase, he says. Gazendam adds that no architecture will be dictated, but rather companies will be able to pitch what they consider the best solution to the centre.
French company Bull is expected to bid for phase two. Group research and development director Michel Guillemet says such centres, which have previously been prohibitively expensive, should open avenues for world-class research in other arenas.
Acting MD of Bull's local branch, Maurice Staal, says Bull is hoping to supply the infrastructure for the centre.
Share