Team Wits-A reigned over 2014 CHPC Student Cluster Competition

Team Wits-A, from left: Ari Croock, James Allingham, Sasha Nidoo, Robert Clucas, Vyacheslav Schevchenko, Nabeel Rajab, Paul Osel Sekyere, and Jenalea Miller (as CHPC Director Happy Sithole looks on in the foreground).

At the Dec. 1-5, 2014 South African Center for High Performance Computing’s (CHPC) Ninth National Meeting, student-participants of their third annual student cluster challenge worked diligently under the leadership of CHPC Supervisors David Macleod and Nicholas Thorne. South Africa hopes for a three-peat victory in July at the HPC Advisory Council’s International Supercomputing Conference (HPCAC-ISC) Student Cluster Competition in Frankfurt, Germany.

When the week-long contest concluded, “Team Wits-A” from the University of Witwatersrand reigned supreme. “Computing-Moore” captured second, and “Team Wits-E” placed third. The award for best provisioning of nodes went to “Bi-Winning,” a team that believed whether they won or lost, they will consider themselves winners for having had the opportunity to compete. “Cluster-Buster” …

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Out of Africa: Exascale HPC

South Africa’s Center for High Performance Computing (CHPC) hosted its seventh annual meeting, “Solving industry challenges through HPC and data adoption,” December 2-6, 2013 at the Cape Town Convention Center. CHPC Director Happy Sithole welcomed 350 HPC enthusiasts from universities, computational centers, and industry for a five-day event, including two full days of parallel technical workshops.

Why exascale in Africa?

South Africa was recently awarded the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) project: the most powerful telescope ever designed. The iconic endeavor will be installed in the extraordinarily “radio quiet” Karoo region of South Africa in the Northern Cape Province, and will include remote stations in SKA African partner countries such as Botswana, Namibia, Mozambique, Mauritius, Madagascar, Kenya and Ghana. The installation includes full dish and dense aperture arrays, associated data center, and enhanced network topology throughout the region. Its sister project, a low-frequency, sparse aperture array, will be built …

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