ClearSpeed Technology to accelerate national supercomputer for South Africa
ClearSpeed Technology has announced that the company is part of a $1.4 million contract to provide the first national supercomputer to South Africa's Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC). The supercomputer, funded by the South African Department of Science and Technology and supplied by IBM, was deployed in late January at the CHPC primary node located in Cape Town.
The CHPC is a division of the Meraka Institute, a national research centre of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR).The CHPC's mission is to provide high-end computing infrastructure and expertise for all research activities in South Africa, which include natural sciences, medicine, engineering and social sciences.
The new supercomputer will be used to support the key priorities of South Africa's research and development strategy, enhancing both quality of life and economic competitiveness. A key focus will be on addressing such issues as poverty reduction, HIV/AIDS vaccine development and biotechnology. The planned application disciplines include bioinformatics, aerospace, material sciences, geosciences and other large-scale modelling and simulation activities which will be accessible to academics and organizations throughout the scientific community in South Africa.
The IBM system will contain multiple ClearSpeed Advance Accelerator boards that are expected to provide a five to 10 times performance boost over the system's standard performance levels. Each of the Advance boards is capable of over 50 GFLOPS of sustained double precision matrix multiplication operations while averaging only 25 watts power dissipation, approximately four times the performance per watt of today's best industry standard processors.
The Advance board's performance and low power consumption combined with its HPC specific design characteristics focused on accelerating general purpose processors for compute-intensive math applications were critical factors in the selection of ClearSpeed Technology by the CHPC.
"The Meraka Institute is taking a strong position in South Africa for advanced technology research," said Llew Jones, Director of the CHPC, Meraka Institute. "The deployment of the country's supercomputer enhanced with ClearSpeed's acceleration technology enables us to bring unprecedented computing power to the academic and scientific minds of this community so that we may expand our collaboration with peer institutions in South Africa and throughout the world."
"Academic systems running compute-intensive applications have strict requirements for precision, reliability and accuracy," said Stephen McKinnon, ClearSpeed chief operating officer. "This is the environment where ClearSpeed's technology provides performance advantages. The deployment at the Meraka Institute further validates ClearSpeed's position for accelerator technology for high performance computing."
