Visitors Archives • Zimbabwe Centre for High Perfomance Computing

ZCHPC at ZITF 2022 on 27 April 2022

zchpc — Fri, 29 Apr 2022 07:01:47 +0000

The Hon Minister of Higher and Tertiary Education, Innovation, Science and Technology Development Pror dr A. Murwira observes a ZCHPC COVID-19 Spread Regulator Robot

Zimbabwe Centre for High Performance Computing (ZCHPC) is showcasing wonders at the Zimbabwe International Trade Fair (ZITF) 2022. Visit our stand and enjoy research works being done by our esteemed technical engineers, and research scientists, respective administration team and management.

The Hon Minister of Higher and Tertiary Education, Innovation, Science and Technology Development Pror dr A. Murwira observes ZCHPC moving robots

ZCHPC is exhibiting robotics, automation and control engineering research projects (COVID-19 Spread regulator robot, biometric (fingerprints and face recognition) identification system), artificial intelligence research projects, robotics (lorry offloading and litter picking robot) and life sciences.

ZCHPC robot picks water for Hon Minister of Higher and Tertiary Education, Innovation, Science and Technology Development Pror dr A. Murwira

See more images displayed in this article when ZCHPC was showcasing to the Hon Minister of Higher and Tertiary Education, Innovation, Science and Technology Development Pror dr A. Murwira, the Permanent Secretary Prof F. Tagwira and other varying audience from several organizations.

The Hon Minister of Higher and Tertiary Education, Innovation, Science and Technology Development Pror dr A. Murwira gets water to drink using a ZCHPC robot

Zimbabwe Centre for High Performance Computing – ZCHPC National Students Cluster building Competitions 2022

zchpc — Sat, 05 Feb 2022 11:21:20 +0000

The curtain came down on the inaugural National Student Cluster Building Competition on the 26^th of January 2021. This pilot program saw eight national universities compete namely Africa University, Bindura University of Science Education, Chinhoyi University of Technology, Harare Institute of Technology, Great Zimbabwe University, National University of Science and Technology, Midlands State University and University of Zimbabwe. The training on cluster building started in June 2019 and was supposed to span a single academic year but due to the Covid-19 pandemic stretched longer than expected. The actual competition took place on the 25^th of January 2021 and the participants were assessed on; Operating System Initial Configurations and set up, Network Setup, HPC Cluster Services and Authentication Setup, Resource Manager Configurations, Monitoring System Configurations and Parallel programming. Speaking at the award ceremony, Minister of Higher and Tertiary Education, Innovation, Science and Technology Development, Prof. Dr. Amon Murwira, who was also the Guest of Honor, said Zimbabwe is determined to become an upper middle income economy and more by 2030 as prescribed by His Excellency President Dr. Emmerson Mnangagwa. He also said this competition was another deliberate step in increasing national capability and work towards that goal. The winner of the pilot competition was team University of Zimbabwe, followed closely by team Midlands State University in second and team National University of Science and Technology in third place. Prof. Dr. Murwira also announced that all the participating students had won a scholarship up to the end of their tertiary education.

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

China retains supercomputing crown in top 500 world ranking

zchpc — Fri, 28 Aug 2015 10:36:23 +0000

A supercomputer developed by China’s National Defense University remains the fastest publically known computer in the world while the U.S. is close to an historic low in the latest edition of the closely followed TOP500 supercomputer ranking, which was published on 13 July 2015. The Tianhe-2 computer, based at the National Super Computer Center in Guangzhou, has been on the top of the list for more than two years and its maximum achieved performance of 33,863 petaflops per second is almost double that of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Cray Titan supercomputer operating at a theoretical peak performance exceeding 27,000 trillion calculations per second (27 petaflops), which is at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

The IBM Sequoia computer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California is the third fastest machine, and fourth on the list is the Fujitsu K computer at Japan’s Advanced Institute for Computational Science. The only new machine to enter the top 10 is the Shaheen II computer of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, which is ranked seventh. The TOP500 list, published twice a year to coincide with supercomputer conferences, is closely watched as an indicator of the status of development and investment in High-Performance Computing around the world. It also provides insights into what technologies are popular among organizations building these machines, but participation is voluntary. It’s quite possible a number of secret supercomputers exist that are not counted in the list. With 231 machines in the Top 500 list, the U.S. remains the top country in terms of the number of supercomputers, but that’s close to the all-time low of 226 hit in mid-2002. That was right about the time that China began appearing on the list. It rose to claim 76 machines this time last year, but the latest count has China at 37 computers.

While there are few major changes in the top positions in the ranking, the aggregate computing power of the 500 companies continues to advance, but the pace is slowing. The current list represents 361 petaflops per second of performance, up 31 percent on this time last year, but a noticeable slowdown in growth, according to the authors of the study. The rise of the use of graphics processors, so-called GPU computing, is reflected in the top 10. Two machines used Nvidia K20x processors: the second-ranked Cray Titan and sixth-ranked Cray Piz Daint, which is installed at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre. But Intel’s Xeon E5 chip continues to outrank all others. Taken together, three generations of the chip (SandyBridge, IvyBridge and Haswell) are in 80 percent of systems, representing 67 percent of total performance.
It is one of three supercomputers funded by the Chinese government in an attempt to build an exascale supercomputer, or a machine capable of processing a million trillion calculations per second. Tianhe-2’s current top performance is 33,860 trillion calculations per second.
The Top 500 list, published twice a year to coincide with supercomputer conferences, is closely watched as an indicator of the status of development and investment in high-performance computing around the world. It also provides insights into what technologies are popular among organizations building these machines.

Source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2947432/china-retains-supercomputing-crown-in-latest-top-500-ranking.html

Author: Martyn Williams Senior U.S. Correspondent, IDG News Service

Date : July 13, 2015

HPC Comes Alive in Southern Africa

zchpc — Fri, 28 Aug 2015 10:29:19 +0000

Elizabeth Leake, STEM-Trek

South Africa’s Kruger National Park was the perfect setting for the conservation-themed, Ninth Annual Center for High Performance Computing’s (CHPC) National Meeting titled “Towards an Energy-Efficient HPC System.” Additional meetings were co-located Dec. 1-5, 2014, including the Southern African Development Community (SADC) HPC Forum, HPC Advisory Council, and the Industrial HPC Advisory Forum.

CHPC Director Happy Sithole opened the conference by thanking conference sponsors, especially its diamond sponsor, Intel, and welcoming 305 HPC enthusiasts from 19 countries and 12 research arenas, including SADC delegates, system administrators, researchers, computational scientists, and industry affiliates. Ninety-two South African students presented posters, or competed for a chance to represent South Africa in July at the HPC Advisory Council International Supercomputing Conference (HPCAC-ISC) Student Cluster Competition in Frankfurt, Germany.

Kruger is one of South Africa’s largest national parks, and home to 336 native trees, 49 fish, 34 amphibians, 114 reptiles, 507 birds, and more than 140 mammalian species that roam freely in a sanctuary the size of Slovenia (or New Jersey-U.S.). Summer had just begun and Kruger’s “Big Five” were active, including rhino, elephant, buffalo, lion, and leopard. The most dangerous animal in South Africa isn’t among the Big Five. Hippos are responsible for the most human deaths and are consequently killed by people who feel threatened, or poached for their tusks, fat and meat.

The Skukuza rest camp features an elegant airport with daily Airlink service from Johannesburg. Its Cattle Baron restaurant serves a Madagascar Peppercorn Steak that would impress the most discerning human carnivore. Additional amenities include a new conference center, air-conditioned bungalows, and paved roads where guests view wildlife from the safety of ranger-driven safari trucks.

Wildlife photos by Filippo Spiga (University of Cambridge-UK)

Pre-conference workshops, tutorials, plenary talks by international experts, and breakaway sessions spoke to the very heart of HPC. The program was thoughtfully selected to explore energy-efficient HPC architectural concepts, strategies for software optimization, advances in middleware, international cyberinfrastructure (CI) policy, industry expectations, and a road map for pan-African human capital development (HCD). A conference help desk was available for attendees with questions about CHPC resources. Students engaged in collegial competition, and a less friendly, but highly entertaining, HPC Vendor Crossfire was chaired by Addison Snell (Intersect360 Research).