When the South African government launched its largest (both in South Africa and the continent as a whole) supercomputer at CHPC in Cape Town, Marc Hamilton, Sun VP of Americas Systems Practice was there to interview Naledi Pandor, South African Minister of Science and Technology, on the system and the Sun technology at its core - the second generation Sun Constellation System.

One of several second generation Sun Constellation Systems now installed worldwide, the South African system evokes what Hamilton labels a common theme among its users, who, in the case of Pandor, explained her government's CHPC investment as an instance of "outcompute to outcompete," citing in particular South Africa's ongoing competition with Australia to host the Square Kilometer Array project.

As other entities who have implemented the Sun Constellation System, South Africa's CHPC employs the Sun Glacier passive water cooled doors on its hardware, enabling the installation to save some 25% or more on the typical costs of cooling a datacenter.

Given the need for South Africa's increase electrical generation capacity by 20 Gigawatts by 2020, Hamilton commended the CHPC installation and commented to Pandor that other South African data centers might well consider adopting the forward looking, passive green technology in place at CHPC.

Hamilton notes as well the concern for reducing TCO in the use of open source software at CHPC, where Sun HPC software, Linux Edition and Sun Grid Engine software and the Sun Lustre File System have been adopted

The infrastructure at CHPC also includes a Sun M9000 system, with 256 UltraSPARC CPU cores and 2 TB of memory, Hamilton writes, which will be used to run large share memory codes for computational fluid dynamics research as well as other research requiring a large shared memory system. Running the open source Solaris OS, the M9000 will provide users an HPC environment similar to the Sun Constellation System, including Sun Grid Engine and NFS access to the Lustre file system, he concludes.

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