|
The first supercomputers introduced in the 1960s were designed primarily by Seymour Cray at Control Data Corporation (CDC), and led the market into the 1970s. Today, some of the top supercomputers are typically one-of-a-kind custom designs produced by a range of companies.
Supercomputers form part of what is termed ‘cyberinfrastructure’. In South Africa, the Department of Science and Technology (DST) has taken the lead by investing in the national cyberinfrastructure.
Apart from the CHPC, this comprises the South African National Research Network (SANReN), an intervention to connect research and higher education initiatives in Pretoria, Johannesburg, Bloemfontein, Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, East London, Durban and elsewhere in the country on a 10 Gbps (Gigabits per second) optic fibre ring network. This network will enable the research community to engage in meaningful online collaboration. It will be used to link to international bandwidth acquired for research purposes. The DST is considering to an investment in the Very Large Datasets storage initiative to ensure that valuable data can be stored, retrieved and information extracted from the data.
The fourth component of South Africa’s infrastructure is the SA National Compute Grid (SAGrid) that allows users to access information and share other resources across administrative domains.
In addition, South African universities and other large research institutions have computing clusters at departmental and organisational levels to conduct research requiring modelling and simulation. This connectivity will afford more effective utilisation of these resources.
 |
The CSIR’s Cluster Computing Centre (C4) is one example; another is the High Performance Computing (HPC) unit of the University of the Free State, which evolved from a small proof of concept in 2006 to more than 200 powerful cores in 2009. The latter is used by researchers and postgraduate students from chemistry, microbial biochemical and food biotechnology, physics, computer science and medical physics. Albert van Eck, assistant director: computer services for the Research HPC unit, says, “The installation of a centralized HPC on campus enabled researchers to focus more on their research and less on the systems required for the computations. The need for a HPC is evident when one compares the computational time between a simulation on one computer versus the same calculation being run on the HPC unit.”
Supercomputers are found throughout the world, with bigger countries such as the US, Germany and Japan boasting more than 80% of the world's most powerful systems.
|
