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Supercomputer switched on
09/07/2002 07:17 - (SA)
Cape Town - The first supercomputer in Africa devoted specifically to research was officially switched on at the University of the Western Cape on Monday by Education Minister Kader Asmal.
The Cray SV1 supercomputer, housed at the South African National
Bioinformatics Institute (Sanbi) will be used for tasks that
include the search for greater understanding of HIV.
According to Sanbi director Prof Winston Hide, the SV1 is able
to perform at a speed of up to several gigaflops. A gigaflop is a
billion operations per second.
"In the time it takes for light from its screen to reach your
eye, the computer has run through several calculations," he said.
He said the supercomputer made South Africa as competitive in
the challenging field of genome analysis as research centres
anywhere else in the world.
A key mission for researchers was determining the number of
genes in the human genome.
Most approaches to this problem had struggled due to limited
availability of the computing power needed to analyse each of the
three-billion known nucleotides of human DNA.
New computing methods
The Cray technology would allow the development of "forceful"
new computing methods, providing new insight into the number,
structure and function of human genes and their relationship to
diseases such as HIV.
The computer was installed in terms of a collaboration agreement
between Cray and the Sanbi which gives Sanbi researchers a
much-needed tool, and allows Cray to share their expertise.
Cray's website says a supercomputer is defined simply as the
most powerful class of computers at any point in time.
They have already found uses as diverse as making cars safer and
more fuel-efficient, locating deposits of oil and gas, saving lives by predicting severe storms, creating life-saving drugs, and probing the shape of the universe.
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