Dell says the Cheetah supercomputer unveiled this week in South Africa is the fastest on the continent. The 40,000-core, one-petaflop Lengau system, housed at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in Cape Town, is designed to open up new research directions and spur private sector projects.
The system was named Lengau which means cheetah in Setswana.
“When we launched in 2007, we took inspiration from the fastest animals on earth and named our first high-performance computing system iQudu, Xhosa for the large African antelope. The system boasted 2.5 TeraFLOPS, which could perform 2.5 trillion operations per second,” said CHPC Director Dr. Happy Sithole.
“In 2009 there was an increased demand for computing resources, as well as for a new high-performance system, called Tsessebe. The system was later upgraded to 64.44 teraflops.”
Despite the new Cheetah supercomputer being more powerful, Lengau takes up less space than its predecessor. The new system occupies a 19-rack space and has a total of 1,039 DELL PowerEdge Intel Xeon servers, mostly consisting of PowerEdge C6320s with 24 R630s and five R930s.
With a total storage capacity of 5PB, Lengau uses 6 Dell PowerVault MD3460s, Dell Ethernet switches, Mellanox EDR InfiniBand with a maximum interface speed of 56GB/s, and Bright Cluster Management software.
