Good news for researchers in the Faculty of Science! Charl Möller recently joined the IT team as a senior systemsadministrator for the HPC and Linux environment. Charl will be providing support for the HPC (High performance Cluster) and the Linux environment within the Faculty of Science.
This service will be extended to the rest of campus at a later stage.
“High Performance Computing most generally refers to the practice of aggregating computing power in a way that delivers much higher performance than one could get out of a typical desktop computer or workstation in order to solve large problems in science, engineering, or business.” [SOURCE: http://insidehpc.com/hpc-basic-training/what-is-hpc/]
HPC is currently being used by researchers from the departments of Chemistry, Engineering (Civil, Process, E&E, Mechanical and Industrial), Wine Bio Technology, Genetics and Agri Sciences to sift through terabytes of genetic data. Other researchers use HPC to simulate the load capacity of roads and tar, whilst others modulate the interaction between atoms and chemical reactions.
This service is available to any researcher on campus, provided that it is used for research and non-commercial purposes. In total it consists of 992 CPU’s and 2048GB of memory and can handle workloads varying from hundreds of small tasks running parallel to large, single tasks processed by a few machines.
For more information on HPC at Stellenbosch University, browse to www.sun.ac.za/hpc.
If you need Linux support, contact the IT service centre at x4367 or help@sun.ac.za.
