Dell in collaboration with the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) has unveiled the fastest super computer in the whole continent of Africa. The supercomputer is named Lengau, meaning cheetah in the Setswana language which is the fastest mammal on land. With its massive 400 000 cores the supercomputer is about 15 times faster than Tsessebe (antelope in Setswana) which is the older supercomputer also named following the naming history, naming the supercomputers after animals.
Dell power
The supercomputer is worth more than a hundred million rands. The system is built of 19 racks with 1, 039 Dell PowerEdge R 930, C6320, R630s servers running on the Intel Xeon E7 8890 V4 processors. It uses Dell Networking Ethernet switches and Mellanox EDR InfiniBand. It has a storage capacity of 5 Petabytes.
Tsessebe’s performance was at 24.9 teraflops which saw it being listed to the top 500 super computers in the world ranking at 311. Lengau in spite of taking less space has performance of 1 petaflop equivalent to 1000 teraflops. The new super computer would see a ranking below a hundred on the top 500 supercomputers list in the world.
The new super computer located in Cape Town will be used in various areas by the University of Cape Town and Limpopo in bioinformatics, climate modelling and astronomy by the various institutions. It will enable the Cape Town Center for High Performance Computing not only in the academic research. It will also be used for commercial and industrial purposes. The project was funded by the department of Science and Technology.
This a great advancement in the field of ICT in Africa as South Africa is following up with the world computing standards other parts of the world set.
A bit of history
The project, begun in 2007 had iQudu as the initial high performance system named after the Kudu and it operated at a peak speed of 2.5 teraflops.
In 2009 with an increase in the demand for computing resources Tsessebe was launched operating at 24.9 teraflops. It was later upgraded to 64.4 teraflops.
Now the new system Lengau is trumping all their records from perforsmance, processing power and the number of area being greatly reduced.
Dell tweeted on their official page:
Our #DellPowerEdge R930 with @Intel Xeon® E7-8890 V4 processors recently set three new SAP world- record benchmarks