The Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) has unveiled its new supercomputer system, the first of its kind on the continent.

Named Lengau, which is Setswana for Cheetah, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) said this is the fastest computer in Africa.

“It will allow CHPC to better service the growing computational needs of researchers and scientists, especially those working on the square kilometre array (SKA).”

The Lengau system consists of Dell servers powered by Intel processors, using FDR InfiniBand by Mellanox, and is managed by the Bright Cluster Manager.

It consists of 19 racks, containing 1,008 standard compute nodes with 24 cores per node – for a total of 24,192 cores. Each node has 128GB of memory.

In addition to the nodes, Lengau has five fat nodes which consist of 56 cores per node and 1,024GB of memory per node.

As it stands now, the whole system has a theoretical peak Linpack performance of 774.5 teraflops.

In the future, the system will be capable of petaflop performance (1,000 teraflops), as the CSIR expands it to comprise of over 40,000 cores.

System Name Lengau Cluster Fat Nodes CPU Intel Xeon (R) E5-2690 V3 Intel Xeon (R) E7-4850 CPU Clock 2.6GHz 2.2GHz CPU cores 24,192 280 Number of Nodes 1,008 5 Memory 126TB 5TB Peak Performance 890 Flops , 774 TFlops (RMax) Interconnect FDR Infiniband Network FDR Infiniband Network Shared Storage 4PB Lustre Storage 4PB Lustre Storage

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