news

CHPC Supercomputer Amongst the World’s Best

6 February 2012

The Centre for High Performance Computing’ Sun Tsessebe Constellation System has yet again rejoined the world’s fastest supercomputers, this after the LINPACK Nenchmark placed it 329th in the international Top 500 list.

This prestigious accolade follows shortly after a marathon R9-million upgrade of the cluster conducted by a team from the CHPC, Cambridge University and Eclipse Holdings. The upgrade took three weeks and plenty of sacrifice as many nights and weekends were spent at the office with members taking turns to go home for a few hours of sleep. Even Research Scientist, Nicholas Thorne, rolled-up his sleeves and joined the graveyard shift, guided by technicians. For most of the CHPC team, this was their first upgrade on a system of this magnitude. Some had been involved in installations and upgrades of a smaller scale. The operation didn’t come without challenges, “There were times we had to wait for equipment that was withheld by customs or that overcame infrastructure restrictions. Fortunately due to the experience of the team other tasks were pushed forward and plans to overcome delay threats were put in place,” notes Albert van Eck, CHPC Systems Engineer. The most daunting task, they all agreed, was the labelling and installation of cables. Cables varied in size to minimize the length of slack and every cable was labelled according to its length and the predetermined position where it should be installed. This effectively meant labelling and installing 88 power cables, 176 network cables and 176 infiniband fibre cables. The dedication and commitment paid off when the performance of the machine improved from 21 to 61 Teraflops. The system is made up of Oracle’s Sunblade X6275 blades with Intel Nehalem 8 core processors and Westmere 12 core processors as well as Dell’s Poweredge C6100 servers with Intel Westmere 12 core processors. It has a theoretical peak performance of 74 Teraflops. Team work paid-off and all are ecstatic and proud to have been part of something of this magnitude. Sakhile Masoka, CHPC System Administrator, comments, “I work with Eclipse Holdings (Hellen and Langton); I know how hardworking and dedicated they are. Working with Cambridge and having their HPC Director, Dr Paul Calleja pulling cables and lifting boxes with me was very inspiring and gave me motivation and great passion for what I do. It feels good to know that what we do is of world standards.”

The improved performance of the cluster will boost the CHPC’s ability to service the African research community as usage of the system had almost reached full capacity, an indication of the CHPC’s commitment to providing a globally competitive, state of the art facility for research. The availability of local facilities for computational research that prioritise local needs and threats, provides an opportunity for possible solutions in the face of HIV/Aids, malaria, climate change, the search for renewable energies, industrial development and other local concerns. African researchers from academia and industry now have a facility that is able to process over 60 trillion cycles of instructions per second, enabling the CHPC to enhance significant research, address grand challenges and develop computational research into a viable mode across all academic disciplines.

CHPC Introductory Scientic Programming School

15 November 2011

A funded full-week Introductory Scientific Programming School for Science and Engineering students who wish to advance their skills in Linux (Ubuntu) and Python Programming language.

27 Nov. – 04 Dec. 2011

Hosted by the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) at Meraka Institute and funded by the Department of Science and Technology (DST).

Syllabus to be covered includes:
Full 2 day on introduction to Linux (Ubuntu) on the following topics:

Overview of Ubuntu Linux Desktop; Running commands and Getting Help; Browsing the file system; the bash shell; Standard I/O and Pipe; Users, Groups and Permissions; vi and vim Editor basics; the Linux Filesystem In-Depth; Advanced Topics in Users; Groups and Permissions; Printing; Introduction to String Processing; String Processing with Regular Expressions; Finding and Processing Files; and Investigating and Managing Processes.

Full 4 days on Introduction to Python Programming on the following topics:

Python basics, Python Objects, Numbers, Sequences, Dictionaries, Conditional and Loops, Files and Input/Output, Error and Exceptions.

Download the full application form in MS Word format.

Download the full program for the school here

CLOSING DATE FOR APPLICATIONS: 18h00 Sunday 6 November 2011

Should you wish to become one of the participants, please complete the following application form and email (with e-mail subject: CHPC Introductory Programming School) the document back to: dmoeketsi@csir.co.za before the closing date. Successful candidates will be notified from 11 November 2011.