Namibia's first high performance computer

Abstract

High performance computing (HPC) refers to the practice of aggregating computing power of several computing nodes in a way that delivers much higher performance than one could achieve by a typical desktop computer in order to solve large problems in business, science, or engineering. The University of Namibia has so far received two HPC racks from the Centre for High Performance Computing in South Africa, of which one is operational. The primary use of the rack was foreseen to be human capacity development and awareness in HPC and to form part of Namibia’s readiness in participating in the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) and the African Very Long Baseline Interferometry Network (AVN) projects, but is now also being used for research in multi-wavelength astronomy and beyond. This is one of the first HPC services set up and operated by an entirely African team. We perform tests to benchmark the computational power and data transfer capabilities of the system and find that each node, on average, has a peak performance power of 82.4±1.1 GFLOPS. We also summarise all the projects that have enlisted the HPC facility.