Namibia's first high performance computer

Abstract

High performance computing (HPC) refers to the practice of aggregating computing power of several computing nodes in a way that delivers much higher performance than one could achieve by a typical desktop computer in order to solve large problems in business, science, or engineering. The University of Namibia has so far received two HPC racks from the Centre for High Performance Computing in South Africa, of which one is operational. The primary use of the rack was foreseen to be human capacity development and awareness in HPC and to form part of Namibia’s readiness in participating in the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) and the African Very Long Baseline Interferometry Network (AVN) projects, but is now also being used for research in multi-wavelength astronomy and beyond. This is one of the first HPC services set up and operated by an entirely African team. We perform tests to benchmark the computational power and data transfer capabilities of the system and find that each node, on average, has a peak performance power of 82.4±1.1 GFLOPS. We also summarise all the projects that have enlisted the HPC facility.

Let's Get Our Heads Out of the Clouds: A scalable and sustainable approach to HPC Training Labs for Resource Constrained Environments and anyone else stuck in the Clouds

“…As the HPC Ecosystems Project expanded into more than thirty African partner sites, so the need for scaling out of the training into these partner countries expanded. Specifically, many of the international partner sites were receiving their first HPC deployments and required HPC System Administrator training [35]. The traditional model of provisioning HPC or cloud-hosted training resources was not a viable approach to facilitating HPC technical training, given that many partner institutions met the classification of an RCE.…”

“…OpenHPC is the standard HPC software stack for the HPC Ecosystems Community and the selection of OpenHPC is not arbitrary -it is a popular HPC software stack due to its simplification of implementing traditional HPC software components [34]. It is widely used with an active and growing community of users and contributors [15,24,34,35,37].…”