HPC 2017-18 | Country profile: South Africa


Firing up a continent


Nox Moyake describes the process of entrenching and developing HPC in South Africa


Te year 1994 marked a much-anticipated turning point in South Africa’s history, a time when all could have equal access to economic opportunities and when all could participate fully in the development of the country’s economy. From 1994 to 2014, the GDP annual


growth rate averaged 3.08 per cent, reaching an all-time high of 7.1 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2006. In that year, the South African government, through the Department of Science and Technology, decided to invest significantly in research in order to drive the much-needed social and economic development, with a plan to increase expenditure on research to one per cent of GDP by 2010. Te idea was to increase the country’s capacity to create and disperse knowledge,


investing in new instruments required to ensure that the country not only had requisite capacity to generate new levels of knowledge, but also to cement South Africa’s position as an attractive destination for science and technology projects. In 2007, the Centre for High Performance


Computing (CHPC) was launched, followed by the South African National Research Network and the Data Intensive Research Initiative of South Africa; together the three are referred to as the National Integrated Cyber Infrastructure System (NICIS).


Flagship projects (2007 to 2014) Once the CHPC was established, the next question was how does the government develop and encourage use of HPC in South Africa. A few strategies were used to entice interest in the field. First was the creation of flagship project


grants. Te centre advertised and granted two- year funding to 11 projects across a number of research domains. Each project aims to solve a major science or socio-economic challenge in South Africa and on the continent in general, using the centre’s computational resources. Te use of HPC resources provided


training and exposure to parallel computing and set the ground for development of additional HPC capacity in South Africa. In addition, the flagship projects advanced research activities in these specific domains and accelerated the building of HPC capacity. University postgraduate students were central to these developments. Tese 11 flagship projects covered the


following topics: l Computational space physics and astrophysics;


l Large-scale simulations of energy storage materials;


l Regional coupled ocean-atmosphere modelling;


l A South African high performance multi- physics computational fluid dynamics solver;


The CHPC team 6


l Electromagnetic computer simulation for the Meerkat and SKA;


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