African supercomputers for African problems
BY CAREL ALBERTS
Please give a big hand…
Recognition is due to the Department of Science and Technology (DST) for the vision it has shown in funding the National Cyber Infrastructure (NCI) initiative. An ambitious undertaking comprising four broad programmes (see below), the NCI is aimed at providing nationally-accessible high-performance computing – for purposes of establishing a globally competitive research and development (R&D) competency in the country.
Professor Colin Wright, acting manager of the NCI initiative, says it comprises four primary pillars, together constituting a national ICT ecosystem that will allow the country to tackle R&D problems of and on a scale not until now possible:
• The CHPC in Rosebank, Cape Town – established in 2007, it forms the heart of the NCI initiative (situated at the top of our pyramid in the graphic).
• The South African National Research Network (SANReN) – a high-speed, dedicated national network in the making, SANReN will ultimately inter-link research universities (including smaller regional supercomputing nodes, for example at the CSIR’s Tshwane office) and initiatives like the proposed South African Square Kilometre Array site. In the above-mentioned graphic, SANReN provides the connectivity hops between the CHPC, universities and other sites of scientific or research importance around the country.*
• The SA Grid initiative, employing clustering and software-as-a-service principles to stitch the country’s top-end computing resources together and remotely provision applications. The grid is depicted with the use of triangles in the graphic; and
• The proposed Very Large Data Sets initiative, which reaches beyond questions of bytes for bucks into issues of proper storage standards, for integration and analysis. “The stupendous amounts of data produced every day as a matter of course ought to remain available, or subsequent generations will be the poorer, as we are the poorer for the loss of ability to interpret historic data,” says Wright.
Sources: http://www.chpc.ac.za/,
http://www.meraka.org.za/sanren.htm
Concrete initiatives – CHPC
Of these four, the CHPC is the most mature undertaking, about to enter Phase 2 at the time of writing (its third supercomputer, details undisclosed). Tackling so-called grand challenges staring the country (and international clients) in the face, the CHPC’s establishment and running is the responsibility of the CSIR’s Meraka Institute.
CHPC has several very interesting projects on the go, notes Wright. It has already completed its programmatic support of the following three research projects within SA universities, and will support their future efforts only on an ad hoc basis:
- UCT’s climatological and oceanographic project to model weather patterns and ocean currents;
- The University of Limpopo’s computer and material sciences project researching and developing new battery types; and
- The University of the North West’s space radiation research programme.
Currently CHPC is still funding (that is, providing computing cycles and user support to) the following universities and projects:
- UCT’s AIDS-related programme, started in March 2008;
- The University of Stellenbosch’s antenna development project for the SKA project;
- University of KZN’s quantum computing project;
- The CSIR’s DPSS Institute’s fluid dynamics project, contributing in-house developed CFD software to Airbus’s development of next-generation aircraft;
- A collaboration between UCT, UKZN and University of the Western Cape on an astronomy venture; and
- A (now delayed) project contributing to the CERN particle accelerator programme.
Proposals awaited
At the time of writing, proposals were being invited for the next round of projects. “While these are headline projects, it doesn’t mean we don’t invite smaller ones,” says Dr Happy Sithole, CHPC director. “In fact, we have up to 170 small academic projects using our computing infrastructure.”
In addition, CHPC welcomes commercial and industry use of its facility. Currently setting aside 30% of capacity for such use (not subsidised), Sithole says the centre (and no doubt the DST and taxpayer) would like to see more companies making use of CHPC’s breathtaking power, to improve their own innovativeness.
SANReN
Among the rest of NCI’s components, SANReN is the closest to fruition. CSIR’s Meraka is likewise responsible for its implementation and management.
SANReN’s first phase was regional, inter-linking four sites (Wits University, the University of Joburg, the CSIR’s Pretoria campus and Telkom’s Hartebeesthoek Satellite Earth Station) in a metro fibre ring that clears data at a rate of 10 Gbps. It went live in March 2008, under the stewardship of Neotel.
The contract for SANReN’s national component was awarded to Telkom in July 2009. In parallel, the Johannesburg network will be replicated in Pretoria, Cape Town and Durban – and later on, in ‘second-tier’ urban centres such as PE, East London and Bloemfontein. All will be linked via a 10 Gbps national fibre optic backbone network.
If CHPC’s goal is to provide accessible supercomputing capabilities to the research community, SANReN’s is to provide the link to remotely provision that power.
“SANReN’s objective is to allow scientists around the country to engage in meaningful online collaboration or networked research, and to link them to international bandwidth,” explains Geoff Daniell, project consultant, SANReN project.
More than that, SANReN is part of a bigger picture, the above-mentioned ICT ecosystem contained within the NCI. Kagiso Chikane, Centre manager for the Meraka Institute, sums it up neatly: “SANReN will give institutions access to … the CHPC, enable a national computing grid and allow for large volumes of data transfer among institutions – typically a requirement of the research community. Of immediate relevance is its importance in supporting South Africa’s Square Kilometre Array [SKA] bid to host the world’s most powerful radio telescope.”
SANReN factoids
For the SANRen network, Meraka specified dedicated (unstructured, unmanaged) bandwidth, accessed via next-generation Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) interfaces. While no network management was required, Telkom maintains the service by way of normal fault reporting procedures.
A once-off upfront payment in the region of R350 million over three years was made for the infrastructure, which supports both 1Gbps and 10Gbps services for a 10-year term. The fee included installation charges. The DST grant specified that no recurring costs were to be incurred, among other tough public finance management criteria.
As a government agency, the CSIR prefers using a spread of providers, as is evident in its use of Neotel on a regional basis and Telkom for the national portion. The international link is funded by Tertiary Education Network (Tenet – a Section 21 company), and uses Seacom. Once the Department of Public Enterprise mooted West African international cable is a reality, it will present another opportunity to acquire international link capacity and redundancy.
Initially endowed with 10Gbps, the SKA installation will require at least 100Gbps of bandwidth to deal with the data it plucks from the Karoo skies.
SANReN requires major cognitive and attitudinal adjustments from its recipients and providers. Whereas universities accepted bandwidth limitations before, now they need not concern themselves too much anymore. The sudden deluge of bandwidth befalling them will also mean having to re-think the way research centres are networked and protected, inside and out.
Lastly, affordability had to be addressed. Globally, the average cost of bandwidth is in the region of $4 per Megabit per second per month. In South Africa, it is still many thousands of rands. Only Seacom’s pledge and a similar one by Infraco’s mooted cable can significantly alter that landscape.
Game-changer
All in all, the CHPC, SANReN, and the planned grid and data storage initiatives add up to a significant wind change for the local academic community. Developing nations seldom get involved in networked research, since capacity (notably communications infrastructure) is costly. (For instance, the earth imaging project that the CSIR is now undertaking as a result of SANReN requires downloading 10 Gigabytes of data from NASA daily.)
When SANReN is in place, complete with its international portions, local research will finally be able to engage in data transfer of extremely high orders of magnitude. Naturally, this will inspire greater scientific and other innovative enterprise, while also positioning South Africa as a serious destination for pan-African research and development.
Conditions have never been more favourable. The influence of the African Union is intensifying, specifically its preference for intra-African trade (‘indigenisation’ or ‘local content’). As a result, more and more African research projects are ending up in South Africa.
“African scientists have tended to take their problems to North America, and then stay there,” says Prof Wright. “Lately, more of that requirement has washed up on our shores, which allows us greater opportunity to support and promote Africa, and to use African resources to solve African problems.
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SANReN |
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Workstations and servers |
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Regional/smaller high-performance computers |
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National supercomputer/s |
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Tags: Centre for High-Performance Computing, CHPC, CSIR, Happy Sithole, Meraka Institute, Neotel, Professor Colin Wright, SA Grid Initiative, SANReN, Seacom, SKA, Square Kilometre Array, supercomputer, Telkom, Tenet, Very Large Data Sets
