CHPC

Forty-three Masters and Doctoral students from universities across South Africa have been accepted (selected from 80 applications) to be part of the CHPC/HartRAO School on Programming with Linux and Python at the Hartebeesthoek Radio Astronomy Observatory (HartRAO), a radio quiet zone dedicated to astronomy and the measurement and representation of the Earth using space techniques (Geodesy).

The week-long school (16 - 21 January 2017) is dedicated to building the capacity of science and engineering students in the basics of scientific programming using Linux (Ubuntu) and Python. The students have no prior knowledge of Linux and Python scripting. 
 

HartRAO is the new home of one of the CHPC Sun/Dell cluster racks that has been decommissioned. It uses the infrastructure to support the African Very Long Base-line Interferometry (VLBI) project, which is part of an SKA project to build HPC in Africa. 

By Nox Moyake

A 15 person delegation from the Taiwan Ministry of Science and Technology, led by Dr Wayne Wang (Director General: Hsinchu Science Park) and Prof Henry H.H Chen (Director of Science and Technology Division) visited the Centre for High Perfomance Computing (CHPC) on 1 November 2016. The delegation is visiting the country for the Taiwan Bilateral Workshop on Innovation Enablers, held in Cape Town on 02 November 2016 as well as the South Africa-Taiwan 3^rd Joint meeting held in Pretoria on 04 November 2016. 

In an effort to establish possible areas of collaboration, the delegation visited a number of centres attached to the South African Department of Science and Technology. At the CHPC the delegates were hosted by Dr Werner Janse van Rensburg (CHPC Research Manager) and Edward Rakate (CHPC Operations Manager). Janse Van Rensburg gave an overview presentation on the CHPC before taking the delegation on a tour of the centre, including the CHPC data centre and the Advanced Computer Engineering Laboratory (ACE Lab).

Janse van Rensburg also participated in the South Africa / Taiwan Bilateral Workshop on Innovation Enablers, where he participated in the Thematic Group Discussions related to ICT and Smart City Applications. These discussions also involved inputs from Prof Grace Lin (Asia University, Taiwan) and Dr Quentin Williams (Meraka Institute, CSIR). It is envisaged that the engagement with Taiwanese representatives will streamline future engagement and collaboration opportunities for ICT in general, but specifically for high performance computing.