HPC 2017-18 | Country profile: South Africa


Te conference serves as a showpiece of the work done by users of the centre in the previous year


having won the overall prize in 2013, 2014 and 2016 and taken second place in 2015 and 2017.


The annual CHPC Conference Te third leg of entrenching an HPC footprint in South Africa involves the now established and growing CHPC National Conference. Te conference serves as a showpiece of the work carried out by users of the centre in the previous year and brings together renowned international and domestic speakers in the field, academia and industry. Delegates attended a number of specialised


workshops and tutorials, birds of a feather and special interest group sessions. Over the last few years, the conference has held a special forum of the Southern African Development Community, that is devoted to the establishment of an HPC centre that will be focused on supporting research carrying a shared social and economic impact on the region.


The future Te CHPC currently has about 1,000 users; most are in academia and others in industry. System engineers and research scientists


Students showing the way


Team South Africa took second prize in the prestigious International Student Cluster Competition held at the International Supercomputing Conference in Frankfurt, Germany. The results were announced following three days of hard work by 12 international teams. The Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) trains Computer Science and Engineering students from across South African universities in its annual winter school held every July and selects some for the national Student Cluster Competition that takes place during the CHPC’s National Conference every December. Winners of the national competition are entered into the annual International Student Cluster Competition that takes place in Germany. South Africa is always represented by a new team of six undergraduate


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students who travel to Germany to build a small cluster of their own design on the International Supercomputing Conference exhibition floor, and race to demonstrate the greatest performance across a series of benchmarks and applications.


Students receive a unique opportunity to learn, experience and demonstrate how high performance computing influences our world and day-to-day learning.


Tsinghua University (China) took the overall prize based on their Linpack score and their performance in the ‘mystery challenge’. Team South Africa was represented by Mishka Mohamed, Kyle Jordaan, Tyrone de Ruiters and Liam Doult, all from University of Western Cape, as well as Phillip Goosen and Lydia de Lange from Stellenbosch University.


The team members were honoured guests of Minister Naledi Pandor during the Department of Science and Technology’s Budget Vote in parliament this year, where she wished them well for the international competition. South Africa has won the


international competition three times


before and taken second position once. Asked on what the magic formula is, David Macleod, CHPC Engineer and the team’s advisor, simply said: ‘We have good sponsors and we come prepared.’ This year’s team was sponsored by DellEMC for hardware equipment and Mellanox for network equipment.


Team South Africa The CHPC has around 1,000 users in academia and industry


provide regular support to users. Te centre supports research from across a number of domains and participates in a number of grand international projects such as the Cern and Square Kilometre Array (SKA) projects. Te CHPC contributes as a tier-two facility


to Cern. Te SKA project is fast developing momentum and the centre has established a SKA Readiness Project that aims to source, and distribute recently retired HPC equipment as training machinery for the eight African


partner (Zambia, Botswana, Mauritius, Ghana, Mozambique, Kenya, Namibia, Madagascar) countries that will be hosting SKA together with South Africa. Te first round of distribution of HPC


machinery and introductory training is almost complete, with Kenya and Mozambique planned for later this year. l


Noxolo Moyake is a research communications specialist at the CHPC


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