The Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) provides the South African research community with cloud and high-performance computing resources. As part of the resolutions from the CHPC’s National Conference in December, the centre is proud to announce that it will serve as the hub for access to physical quantum computing resources for its users.
We strongly encourage anyone interested in the following to reach out to us and register as a Principal Investigator for access to quantum hardware:
running their quantum computing experiments; and/or
porting aspects of their computational quantum chemistry and molecular dynamics simulations from Lengau to be enhanced by a “quantum computer”.
The Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) team, a first time Student Cluster Competition entrant, beat nine other teams from universities across the country. The competition took place at the CHPC National Conference held at the Boardwalk International Convention Centre, Gqeberha.
The team will now progress to the international round where they will represent South Africa at International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany.
The winning CPUT team members are:
Thina Calana
Abdullah Jaffer
Allen Van Dieman
Tebogo Diraditsile
They will be joined by Kapil Ramlall from the University of the Witwatersrand and Lisa Pitsi from the University of the Western Cape to make up the ISC team of six.
Every year, the NHR-Graduate School seeks qualified international and national talents interested in pursuing a PhD project in HPC, numerical simulation, and AI/ML. Fellows will receive a three-year full-time fellowship and excellent supervision at one university of the NHR Alliance in Germany. For further information, please have a look at the NHR Graduate School image video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KlOzV8egsA.
Centre for High Performance Computing’s flagship human capital development program, the Student Cluster Competition is underway at the Nelson Mandela University (NMU) in Gqeberhra. The selection round received 198 applications from 13 South African universities. 80 students are working hard at NMU whilst 40 have joined online. 40 successful students will go through to the national round at the CHPC National Conference to be held at the Boardwalk Convention Centre, Gqeberha, 1 – 4 December 2024.
In response to the need to move large datasets at high speed, specifically for data-intensive research, the South Africa National Research Network (SANReN) implemented a backbone network with 100 Gbps capacity and 100 Gbps data transfer nodes in Cape Town and Johannesburg. Using this backbone, a record data transfer result of one terabyte in three minutes was achieved between Johannesburg and Colorado in the United States of America (USA).
Moving large amounts of data poses a significant challenge. Networks optimised for business operations are typically neither designed nor capable of meeting the data movement requirements of data-intensive research. When scientists attempt to run data-intensive applications over these general-purpose or enterprise networks, poor results are achieved. This poor performance significantly impacts the scientific mission, leading to challenges such as not receiving data on time or resorting to drastic measures like physically shipping disks.
The CSIR, through SANReN, increased network capacity and associated data transfer services facilitate the movement of large datasets by South African researchers and scientists.
The power of the 100 Gbps international link over the South Atlantic Cable System between South Africa and the USA was demonstrated using the new SANReN 100 Gbps data transfer nodes at the Supercomputing 2023 conference in Colorado. The link capacity was filled to 98% and the demonstration group achieved almost three terabytes per second in data transmission between the conference venue and points in the USA, Brazil and South Africa.
Photo 1: Graph showing filling of Amlight 100Gbps link
Photo 2: Amlight_Exp links that were demonstrated, covering three continents
