Taking root or passing trend: Southern Africa’s high-performance computing industry

From climate change mitigation strategies to personalised medicine needs, southern Africa faces complex challenges. The "developed" world has been using technology and high-performance computing (HPC) to solve such problems and thus the question arose - are HPCs being utilised in Africa and to what degree are we reaping the benefits of this technology?

HPCs as a concept are still quite novel in Africa and so we will take a “first principles” approach and start by outlining the concept along with highlighting some of the breakthroughs achieved globally. This will illustrate the usefulness and potential of HPC and then we will explore what’s happening in Southern Africa.

What’s the fuss around High-performance computing?

High Performance Computing generally refers to a practice of aggregating computing power to deliver much higher performance than one could attain out of a typical desktop computer or workstation in order to solve complex problems in science, engineering, weather forecasting, simulations, or any field of concern. What this means for example is that if a problem takes 18 hours to solve on the computers we are used to working with - it would take an hour on an HPC (depending on many different variables of course).

High Performance Computing (HPC) services offered by supercomputers have been described by the European Union as “critical for; i) discovering new drugs, ii) speeding up the diagnosis and treatment of diseases, iii) anticipating severe weather conditions, iv) increasing cybersecurity and v) developing more sustainable products.”