ESTABLISHING THE FOOTPRINT OF THE AFRICAN HPC CENTRE CREATING AND SUSTAINING HPC WITHIN SOUTH AFRICA

Increasing investment in research in several western countries is nevertheless a matter that sparks debate and perhaps even controversy. But increasing research expense in Africa by an African government is really a whole new ballgame. The continent is constantly on the battle bread-and-butter challenges, however in 2006, South Africa saw research investment like a tool to drive interpersonal and economic development.
The actual GDP annual growth price in South Africa averaged 3. '08 percent from 1994-2014, reaching an all-time a lot of 7. 10 percent within the fourth quarter of 2006. The government saw how the country required a GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT yearly growth rate of 6 percent being globally competitive and to significantly improve the caliber of life of South Africans. Consequently, the government planned to improve its expenditure on research and development to at least one percent of GDP through 2010.
The idea was to improve the nation’s capacity to produce and disperse new understanding. To do this, South Africa needed to invest in how it carried out research, and in building infrastructure. In particular, new instruments were required to ensure the country not just had the requisite capacity to create the levels of new knowledge to react to the challenges highlighted previously, but also to securely cement South Africa’s position being an attractive destination for technology and technology endeavours.
The Centre for High end Computing was launched within 2007 and was subsequently supported through the South African Research Network for connecting researchers from numerous universities and research councils and also to enable South African researchers to bring about regional and international investigation efforts. The two bodies formed what is called the South African Cyberinfrastructure.
Once a national resource of the magnitude is established, it should be promoted and used. Below are a few of the strategies the CHPC accustomed to encourage and develop utilization of HPC in South The african continent.
Flagship Projects (2007-2014)

CHPC grants two-year financing to eleven flagship projects across numerous research domains. Each project’s aim would be to solve a major medical or socio-economic challenge within South Africa and within Africa, in general, while using centre’s computational resources. Using HPC resources provided training and contact with parallel computing and set the floor for the development associated with additional HPC capacity within South Africa. In add-on, the flagship projects sophisticated research activities in these types of specific domains, and faster the building of HPC capability. Students were central in order to these developments.
These 11 flagship projects addressed the next topics:
• Computational room physics and astrophysics
• Large-scale simulations of one's storage materials
• Local coupled ocean-atmosphere modeling
• A South African high end multi-physics computational fluid character solver
• Electromagnetic computer simulation for that Meerkat and SKA
• Modelling HIV-1 development
• Modern South Africa astronomy and cosmology: confronting the simulates and also the observed universe
• Monte Carlo simulations associated with technological tools for quantum info processing and communication
• Nuclear collision and data grid for that physics community
• Biomechanics of myocardial infarction and also the development novel therapies
• Computational investigation initiatives in imaging as well as remote sensing

Human Funds Development

The centre provides internships, studentships and year-round courses to its users to make sure they make optimal utilization of the resources. The CHPC Winter season School, usually attended through about 100 students, is really a favourite among computer technology and computer engineering college students across South African colleges.
The school introduces parallel programming courses for high end computing, and covering the next topics:
• Introduction in order to HPC hardware, systems as well as techniques
• Multicore encoding with OpenMP
• Utilizing message passing (MPI) upon cluster supercomputers
• High end co-processors
• Rapid prototyping with regard to HPC with Python
Occasionally the CHPC may invite international pioneers and innovative developers within the HPC field to existing workshops and lectures within South Africa. These lectures are available to all researchers and HPC users to go to.
In 2012 the center introduced the Student Cluster Competition like a component of its Winter season School. Students are introduced in order to parallel programming and taken with the various aspects of your competition. They are then split into groups and provided an assignment that decides which groups will go to the national competition that happens at the annual CHPC Nationwide Meeting in December. The winning national group proceeds to represent the nation at the lSC College student Cluster Challenge held through the International Supercomputing Conference (now referred to as ISC High Performance), in Germany every year.
South Africa has received the ISC Student Cluster Challenge twice inside a row (2013 and 2014). The students who came through this program have gained a great understanding of HPC and also have become a source of young talent for that growing HPC industry in the united kingdom and the African region.
CHPC National Meeting

The annual meeting serves like a showpiece of the work done through the centre each year with the research that is performed through the users. It also supplies a platform for users to achieve knowledge of the improvements in HPC through very carefully selected plenary speakers. In addition, the meeting that also provides chance of users to provide feedback about the centre’s infrastructure and to endure training.
The last four years have experienced a tremendous growth within the stature of the conference. Over this time time period, the number of registrations, the caliber of research contributions and worldwide speakers, the number of sponsorships and quantity of students the sponsorships permit the centre to support possess improved significantly. The meeting has additionally served as a platform for that Southern African Development Community (SADC) to collect and develop a framework for that establishment of a local HPC centre, where the 15 member states intend to combine resources and carry out regional research collaborations on regions of mutual challenges.
The Long term

CHPC has provided the groundwork in making certain HPC is available in order to industry and academic investigation in South Africa. This has been extended to photography equipment. At the same period, the centre has provided a venue for that development of HPC abilities. In the future, CHPC would have been a critical resource for dealing with the big scientific challenges from the continent, such as the actual Square Kilometer Array (SKA), environment research, and data-intensive applications within the big data regime. With regard to these challenges, significant growth in the infrastructure must be realized. In return, these investments will end up being reciprocated with significant advantages accruing to socio-economic development in the area.
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