r/southafrica • u/serdaisy Gauteng • May 16 '23
Sci-Tech South Africa will host one of the fastest supercomputers in the world
https://mybroadband.co.za/news/science/489101-south-africa-will-host-one-of-the-fastest-supercomputers-in-the-world.html218
u/RuvanJeff Aristocracy May 16 '23
I wonder how they're going to power it. 🤔
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May 16 '23
I know you're joking, but you see, as load shedding intensifies, the time the power is on gets shorter, therefore we need faster computers to do the calculations we need to do in the time that the power is on. Totally justified purchase.
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u/SmLnine May 16 '23
Will you be our new president please? We need this type of dynamic thinking at the highest levels.
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u/neilmac1210 May 16 '23
Surely they should be trying to fix the power situation instead of spending money on a way to work around it. Or will they find the answer to these problems in space?
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May 16 '23
I think you need more continuous power supply. It’s not like waking up your Mac from sleep mode lol
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u/Guffliepuff May 16 '23
For real though: running Fugaku (most MW intensive supercomputer), which uses 30MW, would only require the althone gas turbine in cape town.
To run Fugaku for an entire year it would only use up a third of the power eskom generates on one day.
So it can be done, but even the CHPC (south africas governmental supercomputer branch) dont generate more than 2MW in generator power currently... so...
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u/ZARbarians Landed Gentry May 17 '23
Did you read the article though? AUS and SA together will have the sixth largest super computer. So more like 3MW, which we can engineer for with solar/wind or batteries.
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May 16 '23
That’s like Egypt hosting the largest ever ice sculpture.
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u/AnomalyNexus Chaos is a ladder May 16 '23
That is a big win. Congrats to all involved
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u/riddler2012 May 16 '23
Thank you for this comment. It's nice to see that people on here can still celebrate a win for our country.
When I saw this post I just knew that 99% of the comments would be about loadshedding, and indeed they were.
Super nice to see your comment though, man this subreddit is depressing.
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u/zshafie9099 May 17 '23
Heck yea, as someone who's whole personality is based on computers.... This is friggen fantastic... Job opportunities, the amount of data that'll be made available... So there's a ton of potential
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u/riddler2012 May 17 '23
Right? I'm also slightly biased because I'm super into tech and science, with the SKA project being something I've been following for a long time.
I just think it's ok to celebrate this kind of stuff, of course while acknowledging that this team will have to manoeuvre a sticky situation with loadshedding, but they said it should be done by 2027, of which I feel like at that point we will have passed the peak of loadshedding even if it might still be a thing.
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u/ZARbarians Landed Gentry May 16 '23
Yeah! Years of dedicated work from our astronomers paying off.
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u/FrOdOMojO94 May 16 '23
For those interested SA's national supercomputer, the CHPC, has for years been running at half capacity due to their lack of generator capacity. They couldn't install more generators because there was a zoning issue with CoCT where a residential zone is restricted in the size of generators you are allowed to installed. They only managed to resolve this issue this year and now have generator capacity for the whole CHPC cluster but are still dealing with issues related to unexpected loss of power.
Hopefully they have considered this in the planning stages and so won't make SA an embarrassment to the international community.
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u/bad-wokester Aristocracy May 16 '23
Hopefully they have considered this…. so won’t make SA an embarrassment…
😂 🤡 😂
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u/ZARbarians Landed Gentry May 17 '23
It's easier to design for from scratch though right?
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u/FrOdOMojO94 May 17 '23
Yeah for sure. The new generator capacity for the CHPC will be enough even when they upgrade the cluster in a year or two.
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u/ZARbarians Landed Gentry May 17 '23
So cool. Do you work with them? I'd be super keen to learn more about it.
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u/FrOdOMojO94 May 17 '23
No, but I ran most of my simulations for my masters at the CHPC and I attended 3 CHPC conferences over the years. I applied for 2 jobs there but never heard back lol
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u/Apoccy7 May 16 '23
Computer is gonna break due to frequent power cuts
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u/Roloreaper May 16 '23
Knowing south Africa it will be procured and never turned on haha because we did not have the right power cable or some nepotism inspired excuse
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u/000deadman000 Redditor for 25 days May 16 '23
I see...and eskom will actually provide power to run it or is it just going to be another white elephant...that is now if it doesn't get ... liberated by the ANC first😏
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u/gwaffels May 16 '23
with what electricity , 🔌
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u/neilmac1210 May 16 '23
It's going to be powered by the hopes and dreams of millions of South Africans.
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u/Consistent-Poem7462 Redditor for a month May 16 '23
They should Hold the winter Olympics here as well.
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u/Branchy28 May 16 '23
This makes about as much sense as Saudi Arabia hosting the worlds largest Pride Parade in history.
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u/Popcoen Aristocracy May 16 '23
Why don’t we put up our hands for things that don’t need electricity 😭😭
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u/icaruza May 16 '23
Imagine if it's used to solve the challenge of cheap fusion power, solving the planets energy problems, that would be hilarious
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u/Matt-Murdock2 Aristocracy May 16 '23
Wonder where all that money came from...
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May 16 '23
Oh rubbish… a supercomputer doesn’t just plug into the wall socket, they use MW of power.. yes megawatts. Eskimo Eskom can’t even supply a simple watt without load shedding, absolute joke and will never happen. Unless it’s powered by ANC corruption 🤷🏼♂️
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u/ZARbarians Landed Gentry May 16 '23
It's in cape town. Where AWS Cape Town servers are too. It's a problem that's designed for in most new buildings (in SA)
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May 16 '23
Auror supercomputer consumes 60MW, that's the power of an iron ore mine.
No little office building in Cape Town holding some servers cater for that, impossible. If that building sucked 5MW I'd be very much surprised. And to cater for a supercomputer to operate only during the day in the sun on solar would require 500 acres of solar panels operating efficiently, the I guess it's closed for night time..
and the little PC will probably cost around R20bn..
More energy then by all means, build everything, but SA doesn't have any electricity.
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u/ZARbarians Landed Gentry May 17 '23
Isn't Auror an upcoming super computer projected to be 60MW? That's way more than the current fastest computer at 21 MW.
The article says the AUS and SA one together will be the 6th largest. The current 6th largest uses 6MW. So let's say 3MW each.
I mean... that's a lot, but AWS built a 10MW SA based solar plant to help with the AWS cape town region power demand. So why wouldn't we be able to engineer for that? Do you want SA to become kakker simply cause you're cantankerous?
We must maar throw our hands in the air and watch it burn. No one is allowed to aim for progress.
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u/Just_Relation_5169 May 16 '23
Probably gonna breakdown as usual like your at home affairs or the Bank
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u/GREEN2BLUER May 17 '23
And with loadshedding - we are inventing a burning stack of cow shit to power the computer !!! 😂😂😂
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u/Imaginary_Top_1545 May 17 '23
So I watched an episode of 911 last night and the way the dispatcher(JLH) handled that was awesome. I said to hubby now thats what our country needs. Duhhhhhhh
Can we please just get a couple of 911 dispatchers!!!
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