The team of six undergraduate students has done the country proud and scooped second overall prize; results were announced during an online event on 24 June 2020.
The Centre for High Performance Computing’s (CHPC) national team was part of 82 university students from 11 countries that spent a month working feverishly on a cluster located at the National Supercomputing Centre of Singapore to try to win the overall prize of the International Supercomputing Competition (ISC) 2020 Student Cluster Competition.
South Africa was participating for the seventh time in the competition and has made it to the podium each time, winning three times, coming second three times and third once.
The ISC Student Cluster Competition went virtual this year and ran from 1 June to 24 June 2020. As part of this year’s competition, the ISC organising committee joined the global fight against COVID-19, and the competition included applications that address education and applied learning towards accelerating bioscience research and discovery. The student teams were tasked with testing several applications that are used by scientists and researchers to find cures against the virus.
Team South Africa is made up of six undergraduate students from Wits University, the University of the Western Cape and the University of KwaZulu-Natal namely Guy Axelrod, Victoria Bench, Michael Beukman, Sivenathi Madlokazi, Mikhail Vink and Kalreen Govender as well as Stephanie Agenbag who was the reserve from the University of the Western Cape. The team proceeded to the international round after winning the national one held in December 2019 at the CHPC’s National Conference in Johannesburg. Team South Africa is one of the only teams made up of undergraduate students and is also one of the few that does not have the same participants twice. “For the students to spend almost a month on this competition shows a lot of dedication in itself. The novelty of the applications was geared towards drug discovery using HPC. Well done to the entire team, the mentors from the CHPC and the organisers who ensured that this year’s competition take place irrespective of the challenges the world faced.
The participation of the team for the whole month mimicked the actual challenge that NICIS is facing now which is to ensure that we provide HPC resources for COVID-19 combat efforts in the country, whilst simultaneously looking at addressing issues of connectivity to enhance on-line learning.”, said the Centre Manager of the National Integrated Cyberinfrastucture System.
The ISC Student Cluster Competition encourages international teams of university students to showcase their expertise in a friendly, yet spirited competition, that fosters critical skills, professional relationships, competitive spirit and lifelong comradery. Since 2011, ISC has focused on introducing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics students to the world of possibilities that is High Performance Computing (HPC) – its leaders, opportunities and community, and helping develop critical skills that students will use long after completing their current studies. Each team comprised six students and up to two advisers, competes in the competition and takes part in the world’s oldest, and Europe’s premier, conference and networking event for the international HPC community.
Over the intense competition days, the teams demonstrate incredible capabilities to obtain the greatest performance across a series of benchmarks and applications. In parallel to their day-to-day learnings, the students’ novel approaches and unique perspectives gained during the competition are integral to our own education – teaching us how HPC influences our world.
Last Updated on Wednesday, 24 June 2020 13:35
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The Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) has introduced a CentOS-based OpenStack cloud-computing platform to boost support to users running jobs in the cloud environment.
OpenStack is a set of software tools for building and managing cloud-computing platforms for public and private clouds and is managed by the OpenStack Foundation, a non-profit organisation that oversees both development and community building around the project. The addition enhances the CHPC’s significant portfolio of hardware and software applications that are available to the research community to allow them to perform world-class research.
The CentOS based OpenStack Cloud is a self-service Virtual Machine (VM) provisioning portal where common administrative tasks like VM creation, recouping of unused resources, and infrastructure maintenance tasks are automated and capacity analysis, utilisation, and end-user costing reports can be generated. It has replaced the centre’s VMware virtual environment or IT-Shop cluster that had limited memory resources due to the large demand of numerous projects requiring high-specification virtual machines and was no longer able to serve the requirements of CHPC users when its capacity deteriorated over time.
Improved service offering
The CHPC’s new virtual environment will offer the following benefits and functionalities:
- Self-Service Portal:cloud users will now have the ability to deploy application on-demand with limited technical support to promote rapid and efficient IT Service;
- Metered Service and Resource Monitoring: theCHPC will now be able to monitor resource utilisation from individual users or projects to prepare billing statement as per the centre’s cost-recovery model;
- Avoidance of Vendor Lock-in: the OpenStack solution is open source. CHPC will reduce on cost related to proprietary software such as the VMware vSphere Solution; and
- Enable Rapid Innovations (DevOps):the CHPC staff can significantly reduce on development and testing periods and have more freedom to experiment with new technology or even do customisation to expand the capabilities of the OpenStack Cloud.
“The cloud platform further enable CHPC to gather the necessary expertise both technical and operational to develop, provision and operate a national federated OpenStack platform, and allow for global connectivity in a virtual environment for mega project like the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) and those similar in stature”, said Ms Dorah Thobye, Technical Manager: CHPC.
Technical specifications of the CHPC’s virtual environment
The new solution is built on Supermicro server and storage systems, using the Supermicro TwinPro servers to provide 320cores/640threads (2.50 - 3.90GHz) and over 3TB DDR4 memory providing some 9GB RAM per core and all in just 4U of rack space. It is connected through Mellanox 100GB ethernet networking to Supermicro Ultraand Supermicro Simply Double Servers,providing a CEPH Storage cluster with over 1.5PB (1500TB) of mechanical disk storage and more than 220TB of flash storage.
The addition of the cloud-computing platform to the CHPC service suite, is not only in-line with international standards of High Performance Computing (HPC) centres, but will assist the centre to support its users that are running virtual jobs in the cloud environment such as custom workflows, pleasingly parallel workloads and webhosting. Furthermore, the OpenStack service enables the CHPC to be a road-header for virtual HPC application provisioning and configuration in the future. “OpenStack provides a different offering for other users of HPC and this implementation is a step in the right direction to revolutionise HPC and drive towards converging platforms,” said CHPC Acting Director, Dr Happy Sithole.
Last Updated on Wednesday, 22 April 2020 15:59
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www.sacoronavirus.co.za
Given the unprecedented COVID19 challenge we are all facing, the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) is willing and ready to make compute resources available for dedicated COVID19 research.
Please note that wider cyber-infrastructure support beyond only compute resources, e.g. network, data transfer, data analyses, etc.) may also be possible through the CHPC NICIS partners, i.e. SANReN and DIRISA.
Researchers that are actively involved in direct or indirect research on COVID-19 (or planning to become involved), and who need access to resources to successfully pursue COVID19 research, are encouraged to contact the CHPC using details below.
Contacts:Dr Werner Janse van Rensburg, Research Manager - CHPC: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Helpdesk: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Last Updated on Saturday, 28 March 2020 09:51
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