Visualize the events in a video available at https://youtu.be/EPhJ6sT2xy0

 The Benefits

Participation in the competition will provide the following benefits to the participants:

• Learn how to build and administrate a cluster system which is an emerging career in Information Technology
• Exposure to new platforms and technologies
• Get a chance to compete in Cluster Building at regional and international level
• Possibility to secure a job with the ZCHPC

Requirements for Students

Students who are interested in the competition must be:

• Studying towards a degree under Science and Technology
• First or Second year student
• In possession of a personal laptop
• Flexible and able to work under pressure

In this special guest feature, Jack Rubinger writes that a novel use of high performance computing is transforming the future of music.

Antonis Karalis, HPC Music

Antonis Karalis, HPC for Music

Many will be familiar with HPC and industrial or scientific applications, but now HPC is making its impact on something that touches the soul of millions and millions of people every day — music.

In an interview with the inventor of HPC for Music, Antonis Karalis shared a brief explanation of how the future of music has been compromised and what steps are being taken to revolutionize music composition, the creative workflow, and deliver new entertainment experiences.“Music is presented as a stereo experience from the 70s until today and all the early digital, analog and mechanical tools we use are designed to help us build that ‘interpretation’ of music. Even the music at the cinema is a ‘wide-stereo’ experience 98% of the time, just louder,” said Karalis. But composer and innovator Hans Zimmer and Karalis agree that music was never meant to be a stereo experience — All we have to do is ‘Listen! It’s all around us!’— Hans Zimmer

Music became a free commodity after the invention of MP3 and the Internet and this is something that cannot be reversed just by introducing monthly subscription streaming. Music is the most advanced form of art. Over the last 50 years we’ve only just scratched the surface of what’s possible.“To explore that future, we need to rethink everything, starting from the creative side and how we make music, going to the data center and distribution side and all the way up to the audience experience. It has to be a cohesive approach.” said Karalis.Antonis Karalis and Panagiotis Kontopoulos

Intel and HPCmusic are using the Intel® Scalable System Framework (Intel® SSF) to set the stage for a transformation of the music industry by tapping into Intel’s high-performance computing expertise. Intel chose the recent SC15 conference to debut three demos that showcase how high-performance computing revolutionizes music and paves the road for the next level of entertainment for the car, the cinema, VR, the home, mobile and video games.

As Diane Bryant, senior vice-president of Intel’s data center group underlined at her SC15 HPCmatters Plenary, HPC transforms and invigorates all the bright young minds to use HPC in ways that were previously unimaginable: “As HPC transforms the science, the science transforms HPC and it propels us forward,” Bryant said.

Everything starts by empowering the creative side. By targeting artists such as Hans Zimmer who has composed the soundtracks for Interstellar and Inception; Perry Farrell; the man behind Lollapalooza, and renaissance man Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails, the goal is to reach composers, engineers, producers and musicians with home studios all around the world.

“In two years, you’ll see music technology becoming 35x more affordable than it is today and 300x more powerful. This is just a starting point for Intel® SSF and the HPCmusic® Aural Computing Engine (ACE). It is the dawn of a new platform. Digital 2.0 era is here it is only possible using HPC. You’ll see music composers and movie directors working side-by-side in real time virtual environments to create audio-visual experiences that are simply not possible with today’s tools and workflows. You’ll see musicians and arrangers working with instruments that don’t exist in the real world and sound engineers building sound effects based on adaptive-intelligence that completely change the sound of music as we know it.” explained Karalis.

box“When creating music in the analog, mechanical and early digital world, you’re limited by the primitive rules, the bottlenecks and system architectures of those worlds. We’re at the beginning of something that’s not bound by those rules. Intel enable us to push the boundaries of what is possible. I am convinced that the tools we need to invent in order to push music and sound forward can not be invented without HPC,” said Karalis.

“We are not competing with a Fender guitar, a tube amplifier, a Moog synthesizer or vinyl and the old analog-stereo experience or its modern low quality MP3 incarnation. For us, stereophonic music is a thing of the past. HPC for music makes analog, mechanical, early digital obsolete, along with all the creative tools, workflows and the business models of that era. Creative people all around the world can rethink how they make music and this is what will eventually change the user experience. At the same time, empowered by big data, we make sure that piracy will not cripple the future of music again,” he said.

The new model is going to require high performance computing, the creation of new advanced algorithms based on the HPCmusic’s (ACE) running on Intel® SSF.“We’re looking at a common set of tools to enable people to create new music technologies and new user experiences,” explained Jon Markee with Intel’s High Performance Computing Division.Intel® SSF represents a new architectural direction for developing high performance, balanced, power-efficient and reliable systems capable of supporting a wide range of workloads including both compute-intensive and data-intensive workloads.

chartBecause composing, performing, arranging and distributing music requires both compute-intensive and data-intensive workloads, Intel® SSF is the perfect framework for HPCmusic technologies.

The three demos at SC15 were led by Antonis Karalis and Panagiotis Kontopoulos of Silicon Valley based HPCmusic. The first demo, the interactive touch-wall, provided a space for visitors to create their own music in a shared compositional environment, underscoring the fact that HPC for music (in the cloud or locally) is an ideal platform for creating advanced virtual creative experiences.

vrIn the second demo, the virtual reality experience, visitors that were immersed to VR head-sets enjoyed a 4D music experience of the compositions created on the touch wall (demo 1) by means of a custom head-tracking, multi channel, real-time binaural audio processing system. This demonstrated that HPC for music has the power to realize the full potential of sound and music in virtual reality domain.

vr2After the two interactive experiences, visitors entered the central part of the Intel booth to experience a deep dive into HPC for music. Upon entering the exhibit room, their senses were enlivened by the sound of music like nothing they had ever experienced. Karalis walked them through the creative workflow as well as psychoacoustic, compositional, and computational elements that need to come together in order to create the next level of music experiences. With an understanding of Intel® SSF and HPCmusic’s ACE capabilities, visitors were then introduced to the HPC4D four-dimensional sound experience and the emerging HPC audio format engineered for in-car entertainment, VR, home entertainment, mobile, headphones and the next level of the cinematic experience.

All demos, fully integrated with the four pillars of Intel SSF (compute, storage, fabric and software) were running in real time using HPCmusic’s ACE. Latency on the node level was at the nanoseconds domain, giving a latency on the soundcard output locked below 1ms under any given workload and buffer size scenario. The prototype HPC cluster at the show floor (code name Atlas) was computing on more than 1500 cores (5000 threads) in real time, combining Intel® Xeon Phi and future Intel® Xeon® processors, Intel® Omni-Path fabrics, Intel® Optane Technology based on 3D XPoint non-volatile memory media, Intel® Solutions for Lustre* parallel file system and Intel® Parallel Studios Software Suite.

Visitors were delighted to experience a typical stereo tune available at online stores today, remixed using 7.1 HPC4D sound and compare the two. Outrageous comments poured forth as they noticed the night and day difference.

“When you are going 100% virtual and use HPC for music to power development of new music technologies, disrupt and reinvent the creative workflow and eventually deliver new user experiences, you are entering what I call the Music Technology Singularity. This is the Digital 2.0 era,” explained Karalis.SC15 brought together the international supercomputing community—an unparalleled ensemble of scientists, engineers, researchers, educators, programmers, system administrators and developers—for an exceptional program of technical papers, informative tutorials, timely research posters and Birds-of-a-Feather sessions.

The team generated interest from South by Southwest and other industry luminaries. These demos showed what you can do with today’s tools and beyond.“Antonis is driving the music industry in a new direction” said Brock Taylor, an Intel Ecosystem Architect and Engineer. “While HPC is still widely regarded as supercomputing, new genres of applications are emerging that run counterpoint to typical HPC. The goal is to have a seamless integration of emerging technologies and eliminate worries about capturing upgrades.”

Antonis added: “I am deeply grateful and humbled by the long lasting support from our partners: Flux, AAS, U-He, Eiosis, Rob Papen, 2CAudio, Softube, as they are true pioneers, dreamers, philosophers, scientists and the best audio software dsp developers in the world! Now, it is all about democratizing HPC for music and opening it up to the world. At the end of the day, no progress is possible without the tremendous talent, inspiration and devotion that creative people all around the world bring to the table.”

The demos — a deep immersion into the musical experience — showed that technologies have come a long way to produce music. Harnessing the power of supercomputers completely changes the way music is created, arranged, recorded, distributed and experienced. Intel and HPCmusic are on the cusp of changing your music experience anywhere you go.

About the Author

Jack Rubinger is an HPC industry writer and music aficionado.

The fastest supercomputers are built with the fastest microprocessor chips, which in turn are built upon the fastest switching technology. But, even the best semiconductors are reaching their limits as more is demanded of them. In the closing months of this year, came news of several developments that could break through silicon’s performance barrier and herald an age of smaller, faster, lower-power chips. It is possible that they could be commercially viable in the next few years.

In December, Google and Nasa announced that for problems involving nearly 1,000 binary variables, ‘quantum annealing’ significantly outperforms a classical computer – more than 108 times faster than simulated annealing running on a single core computer. The researchers think they’ve found a quantum algorithm that solves certain problems 100 million times faster than conventional processes on a PC.

In the journal Science, published in October, IBM researchers announced they had made the first carbon nanotube transistors that don’t suffer from reduced performance when made reduced in size, thus making the scaling down of chips easier. Another team published in Nature that they had created a quantum logic gate in silicon for the first time, making calculations between two quantum bits of information possible, and a silicon-based quantum computer an achievable reality.

Both results represent milestone scientific achievements and are highly complementary, said Möttönen Mikko, leader of quantum computing and the devices lab at Aalto University, Finland, and professor in quantum computing at the University of Jyväskylä. Mikko was not involved in either research project, and so is in a position to be an impartial commentator.

Beyond silicon?

In the search for speedier processors, material scientists are looking for ways to improve upon Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) technology. Silicon-based chip performance will eventually bottleneck, in part due to overheating, as they are shrunk to their physical limits.

With the best of today’s technology, a 100 Petaflop machine that runs at 30 per cent computational efficiency would have the same compute power, but about one tenth the energy cost of a proposed Exascale machine, as reported in The new realism: software runs slowly on supercomputers (SCW August/September 2015 page 20).

In July 2015, US President Barack Obama signed an executive order, to encourage faster development of the first Exaflop supercomputer, called the National Strategic Computing Initiative. But without innovation, the power requirements of the first Exascale supercomputer – to find new medicines or solve climate change simulations – become astronomical both in cost and real terms.

Today the most efficient system needs about one to two Megawatts per Petaflop. One estimate has an Exascale computer sucking up 40 Megawatts – enough power for a small town of 50,000 people.

Commercial enterprises are investing a lot in innovation. IBM Research in the US plans to replace traditional silicon by investing $3 billion in chip R&D technologies, which includes carbon nanotubes. These are single atomic sheets of carbon rolled up into a tube. Electrons in carbon transistors can move better than in silicon.

Carbon nanotubes

This October, a team of IBM scientists created a new way to shrink transistor ‘contacts’ of carbon nanotube devices, without reducing performance. This was done with a microscopic welding technique that chemically binds metal atoms to the carbon atoms at the ends of nanotubes.

With this, contact resistance challenges could be overcome down to a 1.8 nanometre node. This means carbon nanotube-based semiconductors will result in smaller chips with greater performance and lower power consumption.

Contacts inside a chip are valves that control the flow of electrons from metal into the semiconductor’s channels. As transistors shrink, electrical resistance increases within the contacts, impeding performance. Some estimates are that the performance of carbon nanotubes will be five to 10 times better than silicon circuits.

But the death of silicon has been predicted many times in the past. Gallium arsenide, for example, was once touted as a better replacement. But silicon is abundant and cheap to process. In addition, a silicon crystal has a very stable structure, can be grown to very large diameter boules and processed with very good yields. It is also a fairly good thermal conductor, thus enabling very dense packing of transistors that need to get rid of their heat of operation. Finally, there is a vast amount of production plant already installed and dedicated to making processors out of silicon, yielding huge economies of scale to the silicon industry. “For this new technology to become commercially viable, it has to beat the current transistor, the development of which has been given decades and billions – if not trillions – of euros,” said Mikko.

Quantum computing

So, instead of some exotic material such as carbon nanotubes, an alternative path could be radical innovation in silicon technology. In Australia, researchers have created the first two-quantum bit (qubit) logic gate within silicon, which may unlock scalable quantum computers sooner.

Principal investigator professor Andrew Dzurak, based at the University of New South Wales in Australia (UNSW), and his team found that qubits were able to influence each other directly, as a logic gate, when performing calculations using the mechanics of subatomic particles.

Like a compass, the magnetic field of an electron dictates the binary code of ‘0’ or ‘1’. In a quantum system, particles can exist in two states simultaneously too – a superposition. A two-qubit system can perform simultaneous operations on four values, and a three-qubit system on eight values, etc.

The team morphed their silicon transistors into quantum bits by ensuring that each one had only one electron associated with it. Then they stored the binary code on the spin of the electron.

‘These two research directions have rather different strategies,’ said Benjamin Huard a CNRS researcher heading the quantum electronics group at the Ecole Normale Supérieure of Paris, France. Huard, too, is in a position to act as impartial commentator. “The UNSW team… shows that spins in silicon constitute promising candidates. Comparatively, the IBM discovery is more incremental, since it can readily be applied to usual computers if the technology is pushed to its limits.”

Time for development

However, it may take at least a decade before a commercial qubit chip could be ready, even if all goes well. ‘We are aiming to have a prototype chip that demonstrates the manufacturing pathway ready in five years. I think it will be very challenging to have a commercially available processor chip ready within 10 years,’ said Dzurak. The Australian team has just patented its design for a full-scale quantum computer chip of millions of qubits. The engineering programme to scale this technology from chip to a supercomputer-scale system has just begun. ‘If we could do it in less than 15 years, I’d be a very happy man. I think most experts in the field would agree with my assessment,’ said Dzurak.

Back in 1998, researcher Bruce Kane first proposed the idea of silicon-based quantum computer in a Nature paper. In theory, a quantum computer with just 300 quantum qubits could hold 2 to the power of 300 values simultaneously – which is around the number of atoms in the known universe – performing an incredible quantity of calculations at once.

In reality, qubits are prone to errors; you need lots of extra bits or ‘ancilla’ bits, which have a secondary error-correction role in a logic circuit. The actual number of physical qubits for equivalent and, most importantly, accurate computational power could add up to millions when scaled up to silicon semiconductor technology.

IBM scientists recently made a new type of chip that for the first time was able to detect and measure both kinds of quantum errors – bit-flip and phase-flip – simultaneously.

“There are other qubits in the lattice that serve as the data or code qubits, and hold the quantum information. These data or code qubits get checked by the ancillas,” said Jerry Chow, manager of IBM Research’s Experimental Quantum Computing Group.

Quantum decoherence are errors in calculations caused by interference from many factors. These errors are especially acute in quantum machines.

“We do believe we have a promising path forward for scalability… Systems of 50-100 qubits we expect to be possible within the next five years,” said Chow.

Commercial quantum computers

To date, the Canada-based D-Wave system is the only commercially available quantum computer of its type on the market. In 2011 a D-Wave quantum computer was sold to the company Lockheed Martin, and in 2013 a 500-qubit D-Wave Two system was installed at Nasa Ames, where researchers from Google, Nasa, and the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) have been using it to explore the potential for quantum computing. This year, the US Los Alamos National Laboratory purchased one.

The computer’s processors use a particular process called quantum annealing to exploit quantum mechanical effects, such as tunnelling and entanglement. In December, research by the team at Nasa Ames showed that quantum annealing significantly outperformed a classical computer for problems involving nearly 1,000 variables. The team thinks it’s found a quantum algorithm that solves certain problems 100 million times faster than conventional processes on a PC.

Despite this progress, doubts remain. “I do not rule out a quantum-annealing design, but it is not clear if such a technology will really scale in the way it needs to, in order to overtake conventional processors,” said Dzurak.

Although technically impressive, the D-Wave is not faster than classical computers. “It is not clear if the current D-Wave computers are truly quantum computers. There is no evidence that they are faster than classical computers,” said Dr Menno Veldhorst, a UNSW research fellow and lead author of the two-qubit paper.

Future developments include chips directly interfacing with other components using light, rather than electrical signals. “One problem with photon-based quantum computers (QCs) is that there are a lot of overheads to make the chip function,” said Dzurak. “I wouldn’t rule it out. There is a lot of interesting work on photonic-based QCs. If I had to place a bet, I would say the first commercial system will either be a silicon-based QC or a superconductor-based QC.”

Quantum dots

Veldhorst also thinks large-scale architectures will likely come from silicon-based quantum-dot qubits and superconducting qubits – something Professor John Martinis’ research group at the University of California Santa Barbara and Google is currently working on.

A quantum dot breakthrough was recently achieved by a team of physicists at the Technical University of Munich, Germany, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Stanford University in the US. They produced a system of a single electron trapped in a semiconductor nanostructure, with the electron’s spin used as the data carrier.

The team found data-loss problems caused by strains in the semiconductor material, but these were solved when an external magnetic field with the strength of a strong permanent magnet was applied. This system of quantum dots (nanometer-scale hills) was made of semiconductor materials that are compatible with standard manufacturing processes. ‘A large-scale quantum computer will take another decade or two,’ said Veldhorst.

This story appears here as part of a cross-publishing agreement with Scientific Computing World.

• The Director of Ceremonies.
• The Guest of Honour Minister of Local Government, Public Works and National Housing; Hon. Dr. Ignatius M.C Chombo (MP).
• Chief Secretary to the President and cabinet, Dr. Misherk J. M. Sibanda.
• President of the Senate, Mrs. Edna Madzongwe and members of the Senate here present.
• Colleague Ministers here present.
• Deputy Minister; Hon. Dr. Godfrey Gandawa (MP)
• The Permanent Secretary; Dr.Washington.T.Mbizvo
• Permanent Secretaries here present.
• His Excellency Ambassador of the People’s Republic of China, His Excellency Ambassador Lin Lin.
• Senior Vice President of Inspur, Mr. Huang Gang.
• Service Chiefs here present.
• Vice Chancellor of the University of Zimbabwe, Professor Levi Nyangura and all Vice Chancellor here present.
• Directors here present.
• Heads of State Enterprises and Agencies under the Ministry.
• Captains of Industry and Commerce here present.
• Invited Guest and Stakeholders.
• Ladies and Gentlemen
• All other protocol observed

• Introduction

I feel greatly honoured to be welcoming you to this auspicious occasion where we are gathered to witness the official launch of the 1^st ever Zimbabwe’s High Performance Computing Centre.

Ladies and gentlemen, Zimbabwe is known the world over for its exceptional quality of education and skilled human capital. The establishment of the HPC is another achievement for Zimbabwe and should receive due recognition, as it will revolutionize and leap frog our national development agenda.

As a country and a people, we have high expectations and ambitions for the future in the area of computational science and engineering. The HPC offers us a platform to experience and sift through huge data sets and in the process, revealing hidden secrets.

• Linking the HPC with ZIMASSET

My Ministry’s expectations from ZIMASSET is the development of competent human capital and promotion of science and technology. Through the establishment of the HPC Centre, my Ministry has promoted new and emerging technology that is fundamental for socio-economic transformation. The HPC is central to our ability to control the world around us and requires the migration of ideas and practical tools from basic science research into applied engineering.

• illustrations of the uses of the HPC

Ladies and gentlemen the center was not established for my Ministry alone but is for the benefit of all stakeholders.

Benefits must accrue to all government Ministries for example;

• The Ministry of Agriculture and Agro-stakeholders will use the HPC for advanced agricultural research in livestock and food crop varieties development, disease control and monitoring.

• The Ministry of Mines and the Mining Sector will benefit immensely for using the HPC for conducting sophisticated and complex simulations and seismic tomography analysis. This will also include 3D modelling, representing the fluid and rock properties of the subsurface and 4D modelling technologies. The HPC will also be used by the mining sector to run numerical simulations to creating virtual rock laboratory or providing a mechanism to discover and process geodetic information collected by GPS stations.

• The Ministry of Environment and the Met Department will also use the HPC for advanced simulations and modelling of weather and climate predictions using high resolution weather and climate models on operational basis as well as to do research developmental work.

• Defence and Security is key to the existence of any nation and Zimbabwe is not an exception. Our HPC can be used for data mining and linking complex relationships as well as decryption,

Once again congratulations to Zimbabwe, Dr. Sibanda and team that organized and negotiated for the project. Thank you to Inspur for the technology transfer and thank you technicians for the technical expertise.

My Ministry is looking forward to interacting with all the Ministries and stakeholders I have mentioned so that we fully utilize the HPC for the development of Zimbabwe.

With these few remarks I welcome you all to this historical launch!!

I thank you

PRESENTED BY

HON.O.C.Z MUCHINGURI (MP)

MINISTER OF HIGHER AND TERTIARY EDUCATION, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENT

AT THE OFFICIAL LAUNCH OF THE HPC

06 FEBRUARY 2015 – HPC CENTRE (UZ)

“There is a tide in the affair of men, which, taken at the flood, lead on to fortune. Omitted all the voyage of their life is bound in shallow and in miseries, on such a full sea are we not afloat. And we must take the current when it serves or lose our ventures”.

Ladies and gentleman, with the launch of the HPC Centre today, the digital technology tide is upon us. This presents a great opportunity for us to break with many of challenges that we face. It is up to all of us therefore, to take full advantage of this technological windfall.

But what exactly is HPC?

This is the question that many may be asking but few can answer. High Performance Computing begins with Charles Babbage, a great Mathematician who started the binary system. Then came Seymore Grey of Manchester University, who with another designer, Atlas, went on to introduce innovative designs in parallelism to achieve superior computational peak performance using a series of computer.

What then is a supercomputer? It is a computer at the front line of processing capacity which can happen at trillion of floating point operations per second. Made up of systems with massive number of processors, it saves considerable time moving data around and makes it possible for processors to work together whilst each individual computer is receiving and completing many other tasks and reporting results to central server for integration.

The term ‘supercomputer’ and ‘supercomputing’ can be confusing because sometimes they are interchanged with the terms ‘high performance computers’ and high performance computing’. We now use high performance computers in advanced technology such as super computers and parallel processing of algorithms to figure out complex computational problems. Accordingly, the main objective of high performance computing is to solve complex computational problems that are too large or would take too long for stand-alone server computers.

In a nutshell for an example, we can use HPC for molecular modeling, climate change research, weather forecasting, quantum mechanics, gas exploration, computing structures and properties of chemical compounds and biological micro molecules, polymers and crystals.

Significance of the HPC Centre

The supercomputer is of immense national utility since it has many critical applications across wide range of conditions. The HPC Centre will be a world-class hub for high performance computing that will support high-end research in many disciplines. Our academics now therefore have technology to take research to another level. With this HPC Centre, we are moving closer to closing the technology divide between us and the developed world. Also, our Researchers that used to go abroad to carry out certain types of research can now do so here.

For our students, here is the digital heritage. We are engaged in a Programme of Re-tooling Institutions of Higher and Tertiary Education. The HPC Centre is the flagship of that Programme. Your concerns about the state of infrastructural in institutions are also our concerns. The PHC Centre is part of the response to these concerns. All this is being done in the framework of a broader thrust to enhance your conditions of learning and research. This technology frees up your time and extends your reach. Go for it!

Conclusion

Ladies and gentlemen, shall, iacta alea est or the die is cast. How well the centre will be used and maintained remains to be seen. How much we will benefit from using the HPC will be for even greater interest. Uses and benefits are what separate white elephant from beehive. Just how will we respond to the establishment of a centre like this?

Ladies and gentlemen, I found an interesting analogy of people’s reaction to events in Chinese philosophy of Confucius where I read a proverb which says:

“When the winds of change blow

Some people will build walls

But others will build windmills”

Here we are. There is now an opportunity for us all to build windmills in the use of the High Performance Computer Centre.

I thank you.

BY

DR WASHINGTON MBIZVO

PERMANENT SECRETARY

AT

UNIVERSITY OF ZIMBABWE: 6 FEBRUARY 2015