Home » Meeting » High Performance Computing in the African Bush

High Performance Computing in the African Bush

I’ve been spending this past week at Kruger National Park’s Skukuza Rest Camp catching up with work while attending the yearly gathering organized by South Africa’s Center for High Performance Computing. I’ve eavesdropped on most sessions to get a feeling for the kind of problems facing contemporary high performance computing but also for the numerical scientific work being done in the country. I gave a talk about Big Data in Multi-Wavelength Astrophysics and managed to go on a couple (one disappointing, one very nice) of early morning game drives. Student participation was very much encouraged at the conference and about 10 student teams battled with a computing cluster building project to be completed during the conference. The winners were announced last night, and are going to be trained by Dell in their Austin headquarters to participate into the international finals in Frankfurt next year . A UWC team had won the past two editions but unfortunately this year’s aptly-named (uhm) “bi-winning” team didn’t make it this time around. Team SA also went on to win the international finals on the past two occasions, so no pressure on the Wits team;-). The conference will now be drawing to a close with a Q&A Sessions with the HPC Industry Vendors, and it’ll then be goodbye and see you all in Port Elizabeth on Nov 30 – Dec 4th 2015. In other news, a local water sports practitioner tragically died, apparently while taking a bath late at night in the nearby Golf Course’s Ninth Hole lake the other day. One can’t be too careful with crocs, I guess:/)

CHPC Conference Banner
CHPC Conference Banner

Leave a Reply

Latest Posts