CSIR's computational science capability boosted by C4 supercomputer
29 August 2006

The Meraka Institute recently concluded installation of a supercomputer known as the C4 (CSIR Cluster Computing Centre) at the CSIR. The Meraka Institute is a national research centre managed by the CSIR. The C4 system is intended as an infrastructure resource for the CSIR's researchers who will be using it for the computational aspects of their research.

In virtually all fields of science, such as physics, chemistry, geology, biology and climatology, researchers are increasingly doing much more computational work, which is widening scientific horizons. Research communities in the US, Europe and Japan increasingly regard HPC as an essential enabler for cutting-edge science and innovation.

C4 is an organisational-class High Performance Computing (HPC) system for CSIR scientists who have outgrown their own departmental-class systems or do not have their own HPC systems. The CSIR's computational science community has some very keen user groups who are already lining up to use C4. The initial users of the C4 system will be researchers working in the fields of geology, computational fluid dynamics, finite element modeling and bio-informatics.

Drs James Maina and Morris de Beer from CSIR Built Environment have already used C4 for computing the stresses that a multi-axle cargo vehicle causes at 500 000 points in the road underneath it. Due to the sheer scale of this problem, these researchers were previously not able to have such a high level of insight into this problem. Results from this research were presented at a conference in Canada in August 2006.

Johan Eksteen, the technology research manager at the Meraka Institute, said that an important purpose of C4 was to develop greater interest in the field of computational science in the CSIR. “Computational science in South Africa has been somewhat neglected and C4 will prepare CSIR scientists for an even bigger initiative,” explained Eksteen. He added that the Centre for High Performance Computing is a national initiative funded by the Department of Science and Technology.

The C4 system is located in two different buildings on the CSIR’s Pretoria campus with the core residing in the ICT infrastructure building. A few physical terminals are located in the control room in the Meraka Institute and are connected to the core of the system by a dedicated optical fibre link.

Researchers can use the C4 system by accessing it remotely from their own offices via the CSIR's network. This applies to CSIR people across the whole country, and not only those at the Pretoria site.

The C4 system is based on a cluster computing architecture, as opposed to the purely symmetric multi-processing architecture which was the popular approach to supercomputing in the past. It has been built with commodity-off-the-shelf components, or COTS, using industry-standard architectures and technology.

C4 has 46 dedicated cluster computing nodes, each equipped with two dual-core processors running at 2,6 GHz. Each node has four gigabytes of random-access memory (RAM) and two large hard discs. A further four nodes are configured for management and utility purposes. In the control room there are another four nodes exactly like the previous ones mentioned. These are used for configuration, administration and as physical terminals by visiting users. The system has a shared central storage capacity of two terabytes in a network-attached storage device where users are able to store their input and output data.

“The C4 system's performance is roughly comparable to that of almost 200 top-of-the-line home PCs, the difference being that the components are tightly integrated and operate as an integrated system,” said Albert Gazendam, HPC technical leader at the Meraka Institute. He adds that the software environment was very similar to that which researchers have on their desks in their offices, which makes the C4 system easy for them to understand and use. “It has been designed so that it is not specific to any particular operating system and can accommodate virtually any executive environment which the users' applications may require.”

For more information, please contact Albert Gazendam