South Africa getting R292 million supercomputer

NR7 said:
And what benefit does all this CSIR tech bring the average South African for R883 million over 3 years?
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It isn't a monetary benefit. Take a look at the bigger picture.

It is a strategic cost of developing and keeping skills in the country. You don't know when you will need researchers who know how to build and deploy advanced simulation models onto supercomputers. That cost is there to give the researchers toys to play with and keep their skills relatively available if you need them. And this is one of the few areas SA can still compete in btw.

If a really bad disease (or something like a plague of insects) hit SA, and you need to model its impacts so you know where to deploy resources efficiently, you can tell the SKA people to stop what they are doing and you would have the resources and skills available to build a model to figure it out.

The US does this with its dept of energy. They give nuclear researchers very generous grants to have very, very cool toys like the inertial confinement facility that blasts lasers into a tiny ball to make fusion. Take a guess what you need on hand if you want to build and keep a nuclear arsenal? You need experts in nuclear physics.

It does pain me that a mongrel like Blade Nzimande is in charge of this though.



edit: if you read the response from dear they say the above in gov-speak:
The department and the CSIR/NICIS are mitigating the transition risk through a combination of service-continuity measures, phased modernisation, improved utilisation management, strengthened maintenance of existing systems, cybersecurity hardening, partnerships with local and international research infrastructure providers and planning for next-generation compute capacity. The objective is to maintain access for priority scientific, industrial and public-sector use cases while the renewal process is completed. The department further recognises that high-performance computing capacity is a moving target internationally. For this reason, the renewal programme is not limited to like-for-like replacement but is intended to position South Africa for future demand in data-intensive science, artificial intelligence, climate modelling, engineering simulation, bioinformatics, computational chemistry and other strategic domains. Implementation will therefore be sequenced to balance affordability, urgency, technical evolution and national strategic value.
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konfab said:
It isn't a monetary benefit. Take a look at the bigger picture.

It is a strategic cost of developing and keeping skills in the country. You don't know when you will need researchers who know how to build and deploy advanced simulation models onto supercomputers. That cost is there to give the researchers toys to play with and keep their skills relatively available if you need them. And this is one of the few areas SA can still compete in btw.

If a really bad disease (or something like a plague of insects) hit SA, and you need to model its impacts so you know where to deploy resources efficiently, you can tell the SKA people to stop what they are doing and you would have the resources and skills available to build a model to figure it out.

The US does this with its dept of energy. They give nuclear researchers very generous grants to have very, very cool toys like the inertial confinement facility that blasts lasers into a tiny ball to make fusion. Take a guess what you need on hand if you want to build and keep a nuclear arsenal? You need experts in nuclear physics.

It does pain me that a mongrel like Blade Nzimande is in charge of this though.
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A key difference though is that the US uses the research to further their military, economy, health-care and other research.

Here it will be used to tender-grab money from it an then we will find it barely used and the research barely done on it except for some cadre family members trying to make money or looking for a forced job for their kids...
 
konfab said:
It is a strategic cost of developing and keeping skills in the country. You don't know when you will need researchers who know how to build and deploy advanced simulation models onto supercomputers.
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konfab said:
If a really bad disease (or something like a plague of insects) hit SA, and you need to model its impacts so you know where to deploy resources efficiently, you can tell the SKA people to stop what they are doing and you would have the resources and skills available to build a model to figure it out.
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So what benefits did the old system have for farmers with outbreaks of foot and mouth disease, swine fever, bird flu etc
 
NR7 said:
So what benefits did the old system have for farmers with outbreaks of foot and mouth disease, swine fever, bird flu etc
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So right now we are moving into an El-Nino right now, which means some parts of the country are going to get less rainfall

Global warming and climate change are two huge buzz-terms used in politics and science at the moment, but it’s in the latter where it has blossomed into a huge, and important, big data project for Africans.

Mary Jane Bopape and Francois Engelbrecht are two meteorological scientists studying the phenomenon, and are using Lengau to crunch the hard numbers.

Their work centres around models and projections of the impact of climate change on Africa at large. These models can be used to better understand, plan and (if we adopt an optimistic mindset for a moment) prevent widespread damage as a result of climate change.

Their project is Africa’s very first that encompasses the entire Earth as a system, and they hope to put South Africa on the map as only the second southern hemisphere country to add projections toward the 2018 UN FCCC.

But how does Lengau come into play? The supercomputer allows Bopape and Engelbrecht to produce extremely detailed models — some with a 1km-squared resolution — that paint a more accurate story. They were previously limited to smaller resolutions, which in turn, led to less accurate projections.

For the real nerds out there: running a 1km-squared model of Southern Africa through Lengau using 864 of its cores, now takes less than half-an-hour.
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If you go and look up what Mnr Engelbrecht works on it is things like this:



1787653584783.pnghttps://www.researchgate.net/public...nkangala_Escarpment_of_South_Africa_1972-2022

For winter, spring and summer, there is spatial coherency of decreasing rainfall trends across the Enkangala Escarpment. These trends also exhibit local significance for spring at most stations, and are indicative of less favorable growing conditions for crops during this season. Reduced spring rainfall is likely to also translate to later planting dates (a shorter growing season) and a longer burning season. Trends for autumn are generally weak and lack in local statistical significance or spatial coherency.
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Developing and keeping in a researcher who can do this is why you spend R800m on supercomputers. Multiply it by the hundreds of people who use that machine.

I think that is probably quite important for farmers.
 

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konfab said:
So right now we are moving into an El-Nino right now, which means some parts of the country are going to get less rainfall



If you go and look up what Mnr Engelbrecht works on it is things like this:



View attachment 1932188https://www.researchgate.net/public...nkangala_Escarpment_of_South_Africa_1972-2022



Developing and keeping in a researcher who can do this is why you spend R800m on supercomputers. Multiply it by the hundreds of people who use that machine.

I think that is probably quite important for farmers.
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water.png
 
Is this a completely new machine, or a hand me down from some other countries now "old" supercomputer?
 
myBBexpert said:
Can I buy the old one?
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Even if you could, you won't get it because it will likely be broken up and given to universities.
“Over its first decade, the project redeployed 35 entry-level HPC systems across 11 African countries, pairing each installation with skills transfer through more than 30 formal training workshops for over 700 participants,” he says. “The result is a set of locally run HPC hubs, linked by a shared software stack and an active community of practice. All in all, this strengthens regional cyberinfrastructure readiness and enables African teams to participate in data- and compute-intensive research and global HPC competitions
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https://www.csir.co.za/media-hub/news/retired-supercomputers-power-africas-problem-solver-pipeline
 
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