Boys don't make passes at female smart-asses - Letty Cottin Pogrebin
|
|
|
Sun shines on South Africa
SUN MICROSYSTEMS will deploy in South Africa the continent's most powerful supercomputer at the country's Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) in Cape Town.
The supercomputer will be built on a hybrid architecture, amalgamating 64 SPARC VII quad-cores on the front end with four clusters of Sun Blade 6048 Modular Systems. Each modular system houses 48 blades powered by Xeon E5450 Nehalem-derived processors.
Peak computing power is estimated to be 27 TFlops that will churn out research in energy, healthcare and weather prediction. This amount of processing power will put it at 91st on the Top 50 Supercomputer list, a remarkable feat by any measure. A Voltaire Infiniband switch will keep the beasts fed at an adequate rate.
The first stage of the project involves setting up the front-end SPARCs and the first cluster (48 blades), while stage two will bring the remaining clusters online, numbering 144 blades amongst them. The machines will run Sun HPC Linux and will be assembled in Scotland and the US.
Stefan Jacobs, a Sun rep told us, "Part of the project is the skills transfer that will take place to CHPC resources. This will start during the actual build process and will be followed with a formal training program in 2009 designed to provide local skills that will be critical to the success of the center."
In fact, the University of Limpopo is researching Li-Ion crystal technology that should benefit from the modelling power of the supercomputer.
The supercomputer will be replacing the CHPC's dozen Xhosa Igqirhas who also delved into weather prediction and healthcare, albeit with less tangible results. µ
Share this:
Share
They are right there is lots of SUN in SA, problem is this is just wasted there. Rather give the poor buggers food or genrators, they have no ambition to extend their IT skills as most of the skills have left ZA, no proper plans to upgrade the power so the machine will be turned off till 2011, and no idea how to plan so all of this is just hype for sun so that they can say look what we gave africa...
Shame.......
Considering the power outages that Cape Town have been experiencing the last few years I hope Sun also have a Super UPS and generator together with a fuel stockpile because they run out of that as well on occasion.
No, that would be Joburg. Cape Town is just expensive and a popular gay tourism destination.
I'd be surprised if this wasn't also related to the Karoo Array Telescope, which is in turn related to the bid for South Africa to host the Square Kilometre Array. The prososed site is only a few hundred km away from CT iirc
Won't they just get nicked?
Getting to 91 on the top 50 is "a remarkable feat by any measure." - I'm inclined to agree!
To Mr Mike: I think it is a typo, there is a missing zero. Bet he referes to top500 computers: http://www.top500.org/
See you!
"This amount of processing power will put it at 91st on the Top 50 Supercomputer list"
Shouldn't this be top 100 then. After all if you don't hit 1-50 then you aren't in the top 50...