CSIR’s new supercomputer is Africa’s fastest, aptly named Lengau

South Africa’s fastest computer was today launched at the CSIR Centre for High Performance Computing in Cape Town.

Dubbed Lengau (the Setswana name for Cheetah), the supercomputer will provide research institutions and private industries the required processing power for modelling, big data processing and research.

Related: 5 geeky ways CSIR’s Lengau supercomputer will aid researchers

CSIR’s stakeholders relationship manager Kagiso Chikane explained that the Lengau supercomputer cluster was an excellent feat for “an emerging country.”

The cluster itself was built in South Africa by CSIR staff, with additional input from Dell and Eclipse.

“Dell is proud to collaborate with South Africa’s CSIR on the delivery of the fastest HPC system in Africa. The Lengau system will provide access and open doors to help drive new research, new innovations and new national economic benefits,” said Dell’s VP and GM of engineered solutions.

The Lengau cluster consists of 1008 nodes which each comprise of an Intel Xeon E5-2690 V3 processors, which means the total system boasts over 24 000 cores. It also features over 120TB of memory, and around 4PB (petabytes) of storage.

Lengau was first switched on on 1 April 2016, while the entirely system went live, performing tasks, in May.

CSIR also plans to add more racks to the system by March 2017, which will boost its processing power to the fabled petaflop mark. It currently benchmarks at around 770 teraflops.

Feature image: Greg Willis via Flickr