Sun goes super in South Africa

Sun SPARCs crystal research in the not-so-dark continent.

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 100 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.