Bright Computing, the leading provider of hardware-agnostic cluster and cloud management software, today announced that the largest supercomputing facility in Africa has chosen Bright Cluster Manager® as their infrastructure management solution.

The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) is a leading scientific research and technology development organisation in Africa, undertaking multidisciplinary research and technology innovation that contributes to the improvement of the quality of life of South Africans. The Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) is a unit of the CSIR, and provides computational facilities to a wide range of science and engineering domains. The CHPC’s mission is to offer world-class high performance computing (HPC) that enables cutting-edge research with high impact on the South African economy.

In 2014, the CHPC embarked on a multi-year project to upgrade its entire HPC environment. Their existing estate, comprising four HPC clusters with a combined compute power of approximately 114 Teraflops, were to be enhanced with the edition of a new peta-scale supercomputer. After an extensive and thorough procurement, the CHPC has chosen a combined solution of Dell hardware and Bright Computing infrastructure management software, which will be delivered by Eclipse Holdings, a South-African-based Systems Integrator dedicated to HPC, big data storage solutions, and network and interconnect fabrics.

The first phase of the project will be delivered in late 2015, and will ultimately equip the CHPC with a state of the art supercomputer that breaks the peta-flop barrier, providing the African continent with the first true peta-scale HPC system.

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Dr. Happy Sithole, PhD, Director of the CHCP, commented; “Our goal was to select best of breed technology and create a powerful and robust supercomputer to support the computational requirements of our nation. Our new supercomputing environment is complex and made up of a ‘zoo of architectures’. This exotic blend of capabilities will require a sophisticated and easy to use management platform, in order to simplify, centralise and automate the administration of the many moving parts. I am delighted to have chosen Bright Computing’s Bright Cluster Manager to fulfil this role.”

Nico Meintjes , CEO at Eclipse Holdings, added; “This is a significant supercomputing project for the CHPC, and will propel them to the forefront of computational research in Africa and beyond. The new HPC environment will support many ground-breaking projects, such as the Square Kilometre Array.

Lee Carter, VP EMEA at Bright Computing, concluded; “Eclipse recognises the strong bond between Bright Computing and Dell, and we are excited to be working with them to deliver a world class solution to the CHPC that all three companies should be very proud of.”

Source : Bright Computing