Due to intrinsic limitation of machine translation (our vocabulary can only go that far), its hard to say exactly what makes the CSIR’s latest supercomputer “Africa’s fastest,” but we’ll hesitantly believe for the time being. In the very same announcement presser released yesterday, we’re told the petaflops (PFLOPs) machine (codename Lengau, tswana for Cheetah) can churn through 1000 trillion calculations per second, which supposedly bests the current champ and its predecessor (it boasted 24.9 trillion). 

While size is of factor, the system comprises 1,039 Dell PowerEdge servers, based on Intel Xeon processors totalling 19 racks of compute nodes and storage. It has a total Dell Storage capacity of five petabytes, and uses Dell Networking Ethernet switches and Mellanox EDR InfiniBand with a maximum interconnect speed of 56 GB/s. Quite impressive, if we might add.