HPC 2017-18 | Country profile: South Africa


Once the CHPC was established, the next question was how does the government develop and encourage use of HPC in South Africa


computer science and computer engineering students across South African universities. Te school is an introduction to parallel programming and covers topics including: an introduction to HPC hardware, systems and techniques; multicore programming with OpenMP; using message passing (MPI) on cluster supercomputers; high performance co-processors; and rapid prototyping for HPC with Python. Occasionally, the CHPC will invite


international pioneers and innovative developers in the HPC field to present workshops and lectures in South Africa. Tese lectures are open to all researchers and HPC users to attend. In 2012, the centre introduced the Student


l Modelling HIV-1 evolution; l Modern South African astronomy and


cosmology: confronting the simulates and the observed universe;


l Monte Carlo simulations of technological tools for quantum information processing and communication;


l Nuclear collision and data grid for the physics community;


l Biomechanics of myocardinal infarction and the development of novel therapies; and


l Computational research initiatives in imaging and remote sensing.


Human capital development Second to the HPC role-out phase was the creation of internships, studentships and year-round training courses to CHPC users, to ensure that they make optimum use of HPC resources. Te CHPC Winter School, usually


attended by 100 students, is a favourite among A million reasons to back SKA project


The Council for Scientific and Industrial Relations (CSIR) has, through its Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC), donated a portion of its supercomputer to Ghana, where it will be used for human capital development purposes in preparation for the data processing requirements associated with the Square Kilometre Array’s (SKA) project.


The donation of the supercomputer components is part of the launch of the first African SKA satellite outside of


South Africa that recently took place in Accra, Ghana.


The single rack of compute nodes, with storage and network, was part of the CHPC’s decommissioned Tsessebe supercomputer and is now dedicated to training and capacity development at the Ghana Earth Observatory and will form the initial part of the processing of the data emanating from the satellite.


The technology transfer forms part of the first phase of the CHPC’s SKA Readiness project involving


repurposing and transfer of HPC systems that are out of production to create HPC imprints in the eight SKA Africa partner countries: Namibia, Zambia, Botswana, Mauritius, Mozambique, Kenya, Madagascar and Ghana.


The Department of International


Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO), through the African Renaissance Fund, funds the SKA Readiness project. SKA Africa partner countries, with the exception of Kenya and Mozambique, who are later in the year, have


received HPC systems from three supercomputers: Ranger from the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) in the United States, Cambridge supercomputer from the University of Cambridge in the UK and Tsessebe from the CSIR in South Africa. The second phase of the SKA Readiness project will start in 2018 through the donation and distribution of Stampede, a next-generation supercomputer from TACC, which will expose the partner countries to different types of HPC technologies.


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Cluster Competition as a component of its Winter School. Following a national call, students shortlisted are introduced to parallel programming and taken through various aspects of the competition. Tey are then divided into groups and given an assignment that determines which groups will proceed to the national competition, which takes place at the annual CHPC National Conference in December. Te winning team proceeds to the


international competition at the International Supercomputing Conference in Germany. South African teams have performed very competitively in the international round,


Tang Yan Song/Shutterstock.com


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