Altair has confirmed its three-year Platinum sponsorship of South Africa's Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) National Conference, taking place Dec. 1-5, 2014. Around 350 delegates are expected to attend. The CHPC provides world-class high-performance computing (HPC) expertise to the public and private sectors in South Africa, enabling impactful and cutting-edge research, product design, and infrastructure development.
"The core mission of the center is to increase South Africa's competitiveness in science and technology by promoting the adoption of high performance computing (HPC) across all sectors. From bioinformatics, engineering, and astronomy to the humanities, finance, and art, HPC will play a valuable role in shaping what the future looks like, including our environmental footprint," commented Noxolo Moyake, Research Communications Specialist at the CHPC.
"This is a perfect partnership for us to showcase Altair's capabilities to the HPC community and industry leaders while supporting and encouraging growth in the Southern Africa region," said Gronum Smith, Country Manager of Altair South Africa.
This year the meeting will take place at Skukuza Rest Camp in the Kruger National Park, Mpumalanga. The theme of the conference is "Towards an Energy Efficient HPC System", focusing on green applications and approaches for HPC. Detlef Schneider, Senior Vice President of the EMEA region for Altair, will deliver a keynote that focuses on the use of HPC technology to drive innovation via infinite design exploration. Notably, ongoing collaboration with SGI has put Altair at the forefront of power-efficient exascale computing.
An HPC Advisory Council is being convened to assess and advise how the CHPC might best service industry partners in South Africa. In addition, the South African Development Community (SADC) HPC Collaboration Forum will address the topic of regional collaboration to harness the power of HPC to advance research goals, infrastructure development, education, and public policy. Finally, student teams supported by the CHPC will vie for the coveted opportunity to represent defending champion South Africa at the International Student Cluster Competition in Germany next year.
