IT-Online SKA bid a step closer, Thursday, 17 June 2010, 11:39
Here is an article about the SKA with a little gem at the end - it appears that the CHPC - after all that - is nothing more than a processing node for KAT.

Tellumat has completed the feed cluster sub-assemblies for the KAT 7 radio telescope that is currently being erected at Carnarvon in the Northern Cape.

The units, destined for each of the KAT 7 array’s seven telescopes, will receive and amplify data captured in the form of radio frequency (RF) emissions from celestial bodies. Tellumat’s delivery to KAT 7 also includes software to process the data, allowing for a close study of the cosmos.
The KAT 7, whose construction was commissioned by the Department of Science and Technology, could ultimately lead to South Africa winning the right to host the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). Four countries bid for the privilege, which will bestow immense scientific prestige on the victor, but only South Africa and Australia remain in the running.

The new Top 500 has been updated. (06/2010) The CHPC's machine is now ranked 461, RMax=25440.00 GFlop, RPeak=30860.80 GFlop and efficiency 82.43%. The CHPC was ranked 128 in Nov 2008 (with a Blue Gene/P Solution, RMax=23415.00 GFlop, RPeak=27850.00 and efficiency 84.08 )and 311 in Nov 2009 with the current system (Tsessebe, SunBlade X6275 and X6250, Xeon X5570 and E5450, Infiniband QDR/DDR).

I am wondering what the plan is now? With all this capacity built surely something should happen?

BBC News
By Jonathan Fildes Technology reporter, 8:09 GMT, Monday, 31 May 2010 9:09 UK

China aims to be become supercomputer superpower
China is ramping up efforts to become the world's supercomputing superpower.

Its Nebulae machine at the National Super Computer Center in Shenzhen, was ranked second on the biannual Top 500 supercomputer list.

For the first time, a second Chinese supercomputer appears in the list of the top ten fastest machines.

However, the US still dominates the list with seven of the top ten computers, including the world's fastest, known as Jaguar.

The Cray computer, which is owned by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, has a top speed of 1.75 petaflops.

One petaflop is the equivalent of 1,000 trillion calculations per second.

From DDJ@techwebnewsletters.com:

You just never know when a smattering of partial differential equations or harmonic analysis will come in handy. At least, that's what a pair of University of Pennsylvania mathematicians discovered, unraveling in the process the solution to a 140-year-old, 7-dimensional equation that's stumped mathematicians for more than a century.

HPCwire:
April 07, 2010

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, April 7 -- The first-ever feature-length 3D animation film to come out of South Africa, "Lion of Judah", hits local screens later this year -- and it owes its existence to a massive bank of supercomputers that are working overtime to finalise the movie for our screens.

The movie, created at local animation studio Character Matters, is in final production with the assistance of the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) in Cape Town.

ITWeb has "SA's second satellite delivers", By Farzana Rasool, ITWeb journalist, Johannesburg, 24 Feb 2010

Sumbandila Images [The Bridle Drift Dam in East London as pictured by Sumbandila, South Africa's second satellite.]

SA received the first live images from its second satellite, Sumbandila, this week.

SA's progression into space started over a decade ago and the country expects to make further strides in this area, says Lunga Ngqengelele, acting head of communications for the Department of Science and Technology (DST).

These images represent just the first development expected from the satellite, adds Ngqengelele.

This is beautiful! Fantastic. Wonderful. I wish we could see the images in high-res!

ITWeb By Paul Vecchiatto, ITWeb Cape Town correspondent, Cape Town, 23 Feb 2010

While the Department of Science and Technology's (DST's) budget has been increased to R4.6 billion from R4.2 billion, there has been a rigorous pruning of most of its major programmes, says Democratic Alliance shadow deputy minister of science and technology Marian Shinn.

As a scientist all I can say is not in my name!

The Top 500 have published their results. The CHPC appears once again -> http://www.top500.org/site/history/3006

The following table shows previous lists and the number of systems installed when the list was published. Site Efficiency in the table is SUM(Rmax)/SUM(Rpeak), expressed as a percentage.

This is the Tsessebe SunBlade X6275 and X6250, Xeon X5570 and E5450 with Infiniband QDR/DDR

Our 16 core Tyan (GB Eth + 512 GB + Win HPC) does 43.7490 GFlop - that is 2.73 GFlop/core compared to 9.7 GFlop / core. We have 68.6% efficiency - I think it is due to the network being pedestrian.

OK CHPC you win on performance, but I bet we beat you on cost per GFlop and number of customers per GFlop :)

I guess that the CHPC will be out of the Top 500 in June.

Carl Sagan led me to review the existence proof of the 5 perfect Platonic solids as a schoolboy. Beautiful maths but completely useless - this theory caused self-inflicted confusion for thousands of years.

Why is it relevant in a blog about computers and science? Well, the Not Even Wrong Popperian logic brings the relevance to science in an obvious way.

For IT policy makers, it is the sin of starting from a theory and grasping for whatever evidence to back up the theory.

What are they

In order for a solid to be a platonic solid, the figure must use the same regular polygon for all its faces and have the same number of faces meet at each of its vertices. The platonic solids and their regularities were discovered by the Pythagoreans and were initially called the Pythagorean solids.

The language of exclusion is often used in IT - "'web designers' are not real IT professionals"; "SCRUM is better than XP"; "Microsoft is better than Ubuntu"; ... This uncritical approach is not useful, intelligent or professional. Unfortunately this language of exclusion is not confined to IT, being the basis of the "ism's" - racism, etc. The problem is that it is so easy to take the language of exclusion and extrapolate its intentions arbitrarily. So that "engineering excellence" is made to become "elitism".