The main objectives of the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) are to enable South Africa to become globally competitive and to accelerate Africa's socio-economic upliftment through the effective application of high-end cyberinfrastructure.

These objectives should be supported by relevant advanced eResearch techniques in the Research and Development (R&D) pipeline for all academic and industrial divisions in South Africa - Science, Engineering, Technology, Medicine, Finance and Humanities.

The CHPC aims to enhance significant research, address grand challenges, and grow computational research into a viable mode alongside experiment and theory across all academic disciplines.

The CHPC is one of three primary pillars of the national cyberinfrastructure intervention supported by the Department of Science and Technology (DST).

The South African National Research Network (SANReN) and the Very Large Databases (VLDB) complement the CHPC through the provision of high-speed, high-bandwidth connectivity, and the effective curation of a variety of notably large databases.