South African HPC has Bright future

The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) is a leading scientific research and technology development organisation in Africa, undertaking multidisciplinary research and technology innovation that contributes to the improvement of the quality of life of South Africans. The Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) is a unit of the CSIR, and provides computational facilities to a wide range of science and engineering domains. The CHPC’s mission is to offer world-class high performance computing (HPC) that enables cutting-edge research with high impact on the South African economy.

In 2014, the CHPC embarked on a multi-year project to upgrade its entire HPC environment. Their existing estate, comprising four HPC clusters with a combined compute power of approximately 114 Teraflops, were to be enhanced with the edition of a new peta-scale supercomputer. After an extensive and thorough procurement, the CHPC has chosen a combined solution of Dell hardware and Bright Computing infrastructure management software, which will be delivered by Eclipse Holdings, a South-African-based Systems Integrator dedicated to HPC, big data storage solutions, and network and interconnect fabrics.

The first phase of the project will be delivered in late 2015, and will ultimately equip the CHPC with a state of the art supercomputer that breaks the peta-flop barrier, providing the African continent with the first true peta-scale HPC system.