South Africa Looks to Exascale

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Thomas Sterling, Chief Scientist, Center for Extreme Scale Technologies (CREST), Indiana University-U.S.

Thomas Sterling from Indiana University and Happy Sithole from CHPC

Someday in the future, will we look back at South Africa as the birthplace of Exascale? With the bloom of HPC activity going on there in preparation the SKA telescope, don’t be surprised if it happens.

This past December, over 350 attendees joined CHPC’s seventh annual meeting in Capetown. With a theme of “Solving industry challenges through HPC and data adoption,” the five-day event included two full days of parallel technical workshops and a full-blown Student Cluster Competition.

The systems needed to support SKA haven’t been invented yet,” said keynote speaker Thomas Sterling from Indiana University. “Next-generation HPC systems will be simpler by design, more energy efficient, and able to handle more complex functions.”

At the conference, SKA’s General Manager of Science Computing Jasper Horrell explained how the project will influence the world’s high-tech workforce. With an operational timeline of 30-50 years, and billions in terms of capital investment, Africa’s education system has already begun to support a range of new competencies.

Although Astronomy is driving the initiative in Africa, SKA’s slipstream will support cross-cutting multidisciplinary research for the world’s public and private sectors alike,” said Horrell.

The 2014 CHPC annual meeting will be held December 1-5, 2014 at the Kruger National Park in Mpumalanga, South Africa. The theme is “Towards an Energy-efficient HPC System,” and registration opens May 1.

Read the Full Story about the conference at Stem Trek News.