South Africa reusing decommissioned supercomputer hardware to compete on the global stage
South African researchers are reusing decommissioned supercomputer hardware to bolster the country’s high-performance computing infrastructure.
An initiative led by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) sees this retired research computing hardware used at the University of the Witwatersrand and at institutions across Africa.
In February, CSIR senior engineer and lead mentor at the High Performance Computing (HPC) Ecosystems Project, Samuel Mathekga, delivered previously decommissioned servers to the university.
These were HPC models designed to run on research-grade Dell M1000e servers, which Wits will use for artificial intelligence and other high-performance computing tasks.
Mathekga explained that the decommissioned hardware donated by the HPC Ecosystems Project comes from various sources.
“Some are from the Square Kilometre Array project, some are from in-house at the CSIR, and some are from other high-performance institutions across the world,” he said.
The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project, an international effort to build the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope, has South Africa hosting one of its major telescopes.
While the SKA project did not directly provide any decommissioned hardware, the CSIR said it funded the redeployment of the supercomputer modules.
Wits is just one hub to which the HPC Ecosystems Project sent the decommissioned hardware, according to Project Lead and CSIR senior technologist Bryan Johnston.
“Over its first decade, the project redeployed 35 entry-level HPC systems across 11 African countries,” he said.
“It paired each installation with skills transfer through more than 30 formal training workshops for over 700 participants.”
Johnston explained that the result was a set of locally run HPC hubs across the continent, linked by a shared software and an active community of practice.
He said that the rollout strengthens regional cyberinfrastructure readiness and enables African teams to participate in data and compute-intensive research at a global level.
Decommissioned hardware allowed Wits to compete internationally
Student-led teams in African countries are using the HPC hardware to compete at an international level in global HPC competitions.
“They are an example of how, being provided with access to HPC, they’ve been able to fly and do their own thing. They’ve now built a pipeline of talent,” said Johnston.
At Wits, the HPC and Big Data Interest Group recently attended an international competition using the CSIR-provided hardware as its infrastructure backbone.
The student-led group used the hardware to run massively complex weather simulations, protein-folding problems, and fluid dynamics models.
“The protein folding example was exciting for me because it was the first time I saw my visualisation at one of these competitions,” said Wits student Kevin Ebrahim.
“It was very eye-opening to see all the work that went into just a simple video clip of the protein folding.”
Reinhard Jansen van Vuuren, a senior member of the Wits HPC group, said the team’s weather simulations were important for understanding climate change.
“In these simulations, you’re able to predict heatwaves, storms, rain, and different pressures in certain areas,” he said.
“All of these are then combined to provide not only visuals, but also data to predict natural disasters.”
He said that the collaboration with the CSIR and the HPC Ecosystems Project was the backbone of the group, and the reason Wits can do the teaching and competitions it can.
“The resources we have from them are what we use to teach, to train and to learn, and it allowed us to build a little ecosystem within Wits.”
Internationally, the HPC Ecosystems Project has evolved into a global ecosystem and has won international awards.
The project aimed to begin sending decommissioned HPC hardware to Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) after a need was identified there.
It has deployed infrastructure across the continent, including South Africa, Madagascar, Mauritius, Malawi, Lesotho, Eswatini, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, and Kenya.
CSIR-delivered HPC hardware
Loading ...