The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research is a research institution dedicated to driving the progress of technologies to improve South Africa’s socioeconomic well-being.

Established by an Act of Parliament in 1945, the CSIR provides targeted research in various fields, including healthcare, transportation, agriculture, manufacturing, mining and chemistry, serving the public and private sectors. Additionally, the CSIR provides cyberinfrastructure services, including high-performance computing, broadband connectivity and data management to the research community in South Africa.

“You can imagine, before 2007, there were no supercomputers in the continent, so we started off with a 2.5 teraFLOPS system,” said Happy Sithole (pictured), center manager for the National Integrated Cyber Infrastructure System at the CSIR. “2.5 teraFLOPS was not really that significant, but very important for Africa. That’s where we started. Today, we’re at a capacity of 1.6 petaFLOPS, and we’re growing.”

Sithole spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Savannah Peterson and David Nicholson at SC23, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed securing government funding for high-performance computing in Africa. (* Disclosure below.)

Importance of technological advancements

The South African government needed some convincing to invest in HPC. By addressing pain points, such as climate change and industry competitiveness and demonstrating the potential for HPC to accelerate solutions, the CSIR made a valid case for government funding, Sithole explained.

Technological advancements, such as artificial intelligence, HPC and quantum computing are gaining traction and becoming mainstream, making getting attention and funding for projects easier, especially in the wake of COVID-19, according to Sithole.

“Generative AI came in at the right time because people started looking at the importance of high-performance computing in data analytics,” Sithole said. “It was no longer just for your big science projects or for engineers and scientists. Even my grandmother now could follow HPC and understand that it is important for a lot of data to be processed.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of SC23:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for SC23. Neither Dell Technologies Inc., the main sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE