Centre for High Performance Computing

The Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) was established in 2007 and is mandated to provide high performance computing resources and domain specific support to both public and private sector users. Located in Rosebank, Cape Town, the CHPC is South Africa’s national super-computing facility hosting the country’s largest HPC cluster. Our user base encompasses researchers, scientists and engineers from South Africa, SADC and the African SKA partner countries. Our resources include a 32 000 core cluster, a 30 GPU cluster, high speed 4 PB storage, and a 320 core cloud system. The CHPC is active in outreach and knowledge sharing, with an annual conference in December and regular workshops, including the summer coding school and winter HPC school.

The CHPC is one of three primary pillars of NICIS, the national cyber-infrastructure intervention supported by the Department of Science and Innovation (DSI), and implemented by the CSIR. The South African National Research Network (SANReN) and the Data Intensive Research Infrastructure of South Africa (DIRISA) complement the CHPC through the provision of high-speed, high-bandwidth connectivity, and the effective curation of a variety of notably large and critical databases, respectively. The CHPC infrastructure is updated and maintained meticulously to comply with international standards.