Johannesburg - It was as the group of young South African supercomputing boffins was heading to the awards ceremony that their coach and high performance computing engineer David Macleod made them a bet.
For a week, they’d spent their hours absorbed in the world of high-speed computing at the International Supercomputing Conference in Leipzig, Germany. The six university students were representing their country at the conference’s Student Cluster Challenge (SCC), pitting eight academic teams from around the world against one another. Teams from the US, Germany … two from China, home to the fastest supercomputer in the world.
This was the first time South Africa was taking part – and Macleod reckoned they hadn’t done too badly.
A week earlier, on their way to the competition, they had passed by an ice cream stand in a Turkish airport. “Expensive ice cream,” said Macleod. “For a tiny little cup.”
As they headed to hear their results, the team made a wager: if they won, Macleod would have to buy them each a super-expensive scoop.
“I agreed immediately,” he said. “I thought we’d maybe come second.” The team walked away with gold, and Macleod walked away with a R500 ice cream bill.
But what is high performance computing (HPC)? The idea behind HPC, or supercomputing, is to get a batch of computers working on a programme at once, producing results faster than any lone processor could.
Weather simulations, animation, academia, industry – it all relies on supercomputing. “Consider the car industry,” explained Council for Scientific and Industrial Research’s Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) director Dr Happy Sithole. “Before supercomputing, you had to actually build a model … and crash it if you wanted to test it. Now, you don’t have to: you can simulate the results on a supercomputer.”
In the future, supercomputing will be at the core of the Square Kilometre Array radio astronomy project, processing the overwhelming data pouring in from the array of hundreds of dishes. But it’s an industry that’s still developing locally.
Our Tsessebe Cluster ranked 311th among the world’s fastest supercomputers just last year. Now, it doesn’t even cut the top 500.
A shortage of skills is part of what’s holding South Africa back.
“There are very intricate skills required to do supercomputing, but none of our universities are teaching these,” said Sithole. The CHPC wanted to start attracting the kind of talent they could one day hire, and even begin building the foundations of HPC university courses.
And then came the offer to enter a team at the conference in Germany.
The centre put out a call for local IT undergrads to take part in a local supercomputing competition, pitting them against one another until they’d whittled down the six best that would represent the country: North West University’s Evelyn Khoboka, Cape Town’s Katlego Moukangwe, and Wits’ Muhammad Atif, Kerren Ortlepp, Jan-Willem Steeb and Ryan Strange.
What followed was an immersion in the world of supercomputing, including a sponsored trip to the Dell headquarters in Texas (the company also covered the team’s hardware and travel costs), where they received industry advice on refining their system design.
But it was all theoretical. The first time the team saw their hardware was only two days before the competition began. They were underdogs from the start. Until the competition began.
Over the next three days, the South African system passed every benchmark and application thrown its way, faster and more efficiently than their competitors could muster. And by week’s end, they’d scooped top honours right from under the biggest supercomputing countries in the world.
* South Africa’s first supercomputer, launched in 2007, was capable of 2.2 teraflops and took up nine two-metre high racks.
Fast forward six years and the small supercomputer put together by the South African team in Germany last week ran nearly three times faster – and took up only half a rack. - The Star