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Africa's fastest computer launched in S. Africa

Xinhua, June 8, 2016 Adjust font size:

Africa's fastest computer, which has a processing speed capable of a thousand-trillion floating-point operations per second, was launched in Cape Town on Tuesday.

The computer was unveiled by the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in South Africa.

"The launch of this peta-scale computing facility in South Africa is evidence, again,of our determination to be globally competitive in certain areas of science and to make the necessary investments, and of the competence of South African scientists and engineers to develop, implement and maintain such cutting-edge technologies," Minister of Science and Technology Naledi Pandor said in a congratulatory message.

Floating-point operations per second, or flops, are used in computing to calculate extremely long numbers.

With over 40,000 cores, the computer is the fastest of its kind on the African continent owing to its speed of 1,000 teraflops, which is 15 times faster than the previous system.

The new system has been named "Lengau" (Setswana name for "cheetah").

For users who had limited or no access to the resources in the past owing to capacity constraints, the new system will give them effective access to compute.

The previous system, named "Tsessebe" (Setswana name for "antelope"), was No. 311 on the list of the world's top 500 supercomputers and was ranked No. 1 in Africa.

Other advantages include effective performance of large-scale simulations, and improved capacity to build the private sector/non-academic user base of the CHPC to generate greater national economic benefits from high-performance computing. Enditem