When you think of high-performance computing on a global level, heavy hitters from the US, Europe and Asia may spring to mind. But the democratization of HPC has brought an array of new entrants eager to climb this latter. In South Africa, for example, an emphasis on research and development is helping the nation to not only improve the lives of its citizens, but also make a name for its academic and scientific community along the way.
According to a post by Noxolo Moyake on the TOP500 blog, South Africa’s HPC journey kicked into high gear in 2006, when the country opted to boost its research and development spending to one percent of its GDP by 2010 to better compete on a global scale and bolster its reputation as a hub for scientific and technological research.
To underpin the South Africa’s efforts, the country launched the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) in 2007 with the help of the South African Research Network. Since then, the Centre has granted funding for two years to 11 projects across the sciences, covering topics from HIV-1 modeling to climate change and even research into the nature of heart attacks.
At the core of the Centre’s mission is student involvement, which naturally means providing courses and internships for computer science and engineering students interested in parallel programming for HPC. But according to CHPC, students were integral to each of the 11 flagship projects that its housed since 2007.
Thanks in part to opportunities such as these, South Africa has won the ISC Student Cluster Challenge two years in a row, taking first in both the 2013 and 2014 competitions.
But CHPC isn’t just known for its recent accomplishments; in fact, the Centre is now home to a small piece of HPC history: the Ranger supercomputer.
Known as the first open science petaflopper when it launched in 2008, Ranger was destined for retirement in 2013. But instead of going to a storage warehouse or being sold for parts, Ranger was broken down into several partitions, which were shipped from Austin to several African research centers, including CHPC.
Going forward, the Centre is poised to support opportunities for the good of the entire African continent, including the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) and applications in big data.