Supercomputing: SA back in top 500

The latest upgrade saw the performance of the machine, as measured by the LINPACK Benchmark, improve from 25 to 61 Teraflops, lifting it back up to 329th place - a ranking confirmed at the Super Computing Conference in Seattle, US. "The configuration and implementation of the system by this team, in which South African engineers took the lead, paves the way for South Africa's capability in producing local high performance computing solutions," Laurens Cloete, executive director of the CSIR's Meraka Institute, told SAinfo

Cloete said the Tsessebe cluster was upgraded to meet demand from South Africa's universities and science councils, which had pushed usage to almost 100% of the machine's previous capacity. "African researchers from academia and industry now have a facility that is able to process over 60-trillion cycles of instruction per second, enabling collaborative research that addresses scientific grand challenges, addressing societal issues and enhancing industry competitiveness," Cloete said, adding that the top 500 rating also came as South Africa was bolstering its commitment to host the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project, "a goal for which the centre has been working tirelessly to ensure that it is fully equipped to process the enormous data rates that will be produced by the radio telescopes," he said.

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