Dell reports that the cheetah supercomputer introduced this week in South Africa is the fastest on the continent. With 40.000-core of a petaflop the system Lengau, which exists in the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research or Council for Scientific and Industrial Research – CSIR, in Cape Town, is designed to open up new research directions and stimulate private sector projects.
The system was called Lengau which means cheetah in Setswana.
"When we started in 2007, we took inspiration from the fastest animals on earth and named our first high-performance iQudu computer system, Xhosa, from the great African antelope. The system boasted of 2,5 TeraFLOPS, which could perform 2.500 billion transactions 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 the tsessebe antelope. The system was later upgraded to 64,44 teraflops. "
Although the new cheetah super computer is more powerful, Lengau occupies less space than its predecessor. The new system occupies 19-rack and has a total of 1.039 Servers DEEL PowerEdge Intel Xeon, which are mostly made 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 maximum speed interface at 56GB/s, and software managements Bright Cluster Management.
