The Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) Conference, held in Cape Town earlier this month, provided a platform for students to showcase their skills in building supercomputers and ideas around preventing cybercrime.

The CHPC is one of three primary pillars of the national cyberinfrastructure intervention initiated by the Department of Science and Technology and is managed by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research.

This year’s conference theme was ‘Transforming the Future through High-Performance Computing and Transforming High-Performance Computing for the Future’ and attracted more than 400 attendees from business, industry and academia.

Among the winners for the Student Cluster Competition, sponsored by Intel, was Mapule Madzena, a student from the University of the Free State, who was hailed as the best female student who participated in the competition and was awarded R64 500 in prize money.

Six students from the University of Cape Town and the University of the Witwatersrand came out tops at a national student cluster competition to build a supercomputer and will be attending the International Student Cluster Competition, in Germany, in June 2019.

Over the years, South Africa has performed well at the International Student Cluster Competition, winning it in 2013, 2014 and 2016, and reaching second place in 2015 and 2017.

During the local cluster competition at the CHPC conference, ten teams of students from various universities in South Africa battled it out to build small HPC clusters on the exhibition floor, using hardware provided by the CHPC and its industrial partners.

The conference also featured a Student Cyber Security Challenge, which provided a platform for students to compete in real time and come up with ideas that could protect South Africa from cybercrime.

CHPC director Dr Happy Sithole commented that these competitions are critical to equipping the future generation with cyberinfrastructure, supercomputing experience and to expose science, technology, engineering, mathematics and innovation students to an array of opportunities.

He added that cyberinfrastructure will help industries, academics and nations across Africa.