Minister Pandor congratulates the CSIR's CHPC for unveiling the fastest computing system in Africa
The Minister of Science and Technology, Naledi Pandor, has congratulated the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), which today unveiled its new petaflop machine – a super computer with a processing speed capable of a thousand-trillion floating-point operations per second.
Floating-point operations per second, or flops, are used in computing to calculate extremely long numbers.
With over 40 000 cores, the petaflop machine is the fastest computer on the African continent owing to its speed of 1 000 teraflops, which is 15 times faster than the previous system. The new system has been named "Lengau" (the Setswana name for "cheetah").
"I congratulate the CSIR and the CHPC on this quantum leap in support of South African science, especially data-intense research programmes like the Square Kilometre Array," Minister Pandor said.
"The launch of this peta-scale computing facility in South Africa is evidence, again, of our determination to be globally competitive in certain areas of science and to make the necessary investments, and of the competence of South African scientists and engineers to develop, implement and maintain such cutting-edge technologies," she added.
The previous system, named "Tsessebe" (Setswana for "antelope") had a peak performance of 24,9 teraflops and was No. 311 on the list of the world's top 500 supercomputers and was ranked No. 1 in Africa.
The CHPC represents a deliberate move by South Africa to invest in modernising its research and development capability. High-performance computing and advanced data technologies are regarded as powerful tools for enhancing the competiveness of regions and nations.
The key advantages of the new system are: effective access for users to compute with such resources – users who had limited or no access to the resources in the past owing to capacity constraints; effective performance of large-scale (i.e. many cores) simulations that were impossible in the past, opening completely new avenues of research; and improved capacity to build the private sector/non-academic user base of the CHPC to generate greater national economic benefits from high-performance computing.
For more information, please contact:
Tendani Tsedu (CSIR Media Relations Manager)
Tel: 012 841 3417
Cell:082 945 1980
E-mail: mtsedu@csir.co.za
For DST enquiries, contact:
Lunga Ngqengelele (Media Liaison Officer)
Tel: 012 843 6799
Cell: 082 566 0446
E-mail: lunga.ngqengelele@dst.gov.za
Editor's notes
The "Big Data Revolution"involves a transition in which data becomes a new resource for economic development; and our capacity to manage and manipulate massive volumes of data in order to extract information becomes key to success or failure.
The Department of Science Technology (DST) is the key provider of cyber-infrastructure and access to the global Internet for South Africa's public research system, including all universities and science councils.
At present, the main components are the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) in Cape Town, the South African National Research Network (SANReN), and the Data Intensive Research Initiative of South Africa (DIRISA), which is focused on the establishment of data centres across the country.
These components are managed by the Meraka Institute, which is an operating division of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), with an annual DST investment of about R300 million.
The CHPC's vision is to become a preferred partner for high-performance computing (HPC) solutions in South Africa and the region, through providing world-class HPC capability that enables cutting-edge research with an impact on the South African economy.
