Tuesday 24 February 2015

Lectures by Dr Peter Braam

Dr Peter Braam, the creator of the massively parallel Lustre file-system is in South Africa for a few days to lecture on topics related to software engineering, high performance computing and of course how these topics are relevant to the Square Kilometer Array project.

The series of lectures, organised by the Center for High Performance Computing (CHPC) was originally intended for just the Cape Town region. Due to a high level of interest as well as the new high throughput electronics lab at The University of the Witwatersrand, he spent the day in Johannesburg too.

A great lunch was served and attendance was good, with over 30 people attending the afternoon event. Dr Braam lectured on software engineering practices and also on the state of high performance computing storage requirements which rang several bells in line with the groups research.

I would have loved to post a photo of the event but unfortunately my phone corrupted the image. These things happen...

Sunday 1 February 2015

Cooperation with the Centre for High-performance Computing

Prof. Ekow Otoo and myself were invited to attend a meeting with employees of the Centre for High-performance Computing (CHPC) and the Department of Science and Technology (DST) on January 29th. The aim of the meeting was to discuss the strategic objectives for the next three years. The CHPC plays a central role in providing and facilitating the use of large computing resources to a wide range of disciplines.


More details on the meeting are available at the CHPC website:

http://www.chpc.ac.za/index.php/news2/189-planning-for-the-next-three-years

The CHPC hosts 1200 cores and about 800 TB of disk the SA-ALICE and SA-ATLAS clusters. It is intended to sign a Memorandum of Understanding with CERN on the creation of a Tier2 centre that complies with the corresponding requirements. We are all very excited at the prospects.

Below is a picture of the CHPC Director, Dr Happy Sithole, standing next to the above mentioned resources that have been earmarked for the SA-ALICE and SA-ATLAS clusters.



Below few pictures of the CHPC's computing facilities:





Below is the certificate of the CHPC been given a TOP500 certificate in 2010.



Dr. Happy Sithole and myself have discussed areas of cooperation between the CHPC and our High-throughput electronics laboratory (HTEL). The Advanced Computing  Engineering Lab (ACE) deals with new technologies a the CHPC. It was felt that ACE and the HTEL could work on high-throughput  Below are pictures of a the front and back-plane of a 100 Mbps system that has been donated to the CHPC and that the HTEL could also profit from.