Sun Microsystems Launches Largest Supercomputer In South Africa

By: Kara Gilmour
Staff Writer
Published: Mar 16, 2009

Sun Microsystems has deployed South Africa's largest high performance computing solution in Cape Town. The new supercomputer includes hybrid architecture which provides 27 teraFLOPS of power.

Sun Microsystems today announced it has initiated the rollout of South Africa's largest high performance computing solution at the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) in Cape Town, with local partners Eclipse Networks and Breakpoint Solutions.

This follows from the award of the CHPC second phase tender to Sun Microsystems and its partners to provide the infrastructure for Phase II of this world-class high performance computing facility in South Africa. The CHPC is funded by the South African Department of Science and Technology, and managed by the Meraka Institute of the CSIR.

"The deployment of the infrastructure for Phase II at the CHPC, forms part of fulfilling the government's goal to position South Africa as a beacon of research on the continent and meeting CHPC's mission to enable South Africa to become globally competitive through the effective use of high-end IS infrastructure. In doing so, the needs for the development of high-end IT skills in the region have been identified and Sun is working toward supporting these goals with its local partners," Stefan Jacobs, South and Eastern Europe architect for Sun, said in a statement.

Sun Microsystems built its new supercomputer based on a hybrid architecture which can provide an estimated 27 teraFLOPS of peak computing power.

At the core of this computing power, is a Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server with 64 SPARC64 VII quad-core processors, and a cluster of four Sun Blade 6048 Modular Systems, to be delivered in two stages. Stage one consists of one Sun Blade 6048 Modular System with 48 blades based on Intel Xeon E5450 processors, and stage two consists of three Sun Blade 6048 Modular Systems that house 144 blades based on the next-generation Intel Xeon processor.

At the front-end, Sun will be providing the CHPC with the Sun Visualization system which allows for users to assemble and view 3D models of their data. The Open Storage solution is based on ten AMD Opteron-powered Sun Fire X4540 Open Storage servers, providing 480 Terabytes of data with the Lustre parallel file system for extreme I/O performance and reliability. All of the components will be connected via a Voltaire Infiniband switch and consists of Sun HPC software, Linux Edition, Sun xVM Ops Center and software from Totalview.

"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," said Jacobs.

The CHPC is an invaluable resource for research in Africa, bolstering work being done in energy alternatives, weather prediction, healthcare and other key areas of research.

Another research benefit in the development of vaccines and new technologies, which addresses African challenges, will also benefit from being able to utilize the CHPC. Jacobs says that months of computing on many research projects will be replaced by weeks, days or even hours when conducted at the CHPC.

"Sun is providing an end-to-end solution and has worked closely with Intel in order to secure the next-generation Intel Xeon processor for the Centre," Jacobs said.