Guest Speaker: Dr. Werner Janse Van Rensburg

Overview of the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC):
South Africa’s National HPC Facility

The Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) is South Africa’s national supercomputing facility, which is funded by the South African Governmental Department of Science and Technology (DST) and administered by the Council for Industrial and Scientific Research (CSIR).  The CHPC provides High Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure for the South African research community (both academic and private sector) to enable new forms of scientific and industrial development.  In the presentation an overview will be provided of the research enablement initiatives of the centre, including models for engagement with the user base, application research domains support, software applications profile, human capital development initiatives and infrastructure of the facility.  Attention will be given to the involvement of the CHPC in national and international project initiatives, e.g. the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio-­‐astronomy project, HPC ecosystem development in Africa, development of an Earth Systems Model (ESM) for climate change, etc.  The presentation will form the basis for exploring opportunities for collaboration between the CHPC and OSU in the area of skills development and training.  (www.chpc.ac.za)

Dr Janse van Rensburg obtained his PhD in Chemistry at the University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa in 2001.  This was followed by an MSc in Molecular Modelling from Cardiff University, Wales, in 2002.  He was appointed as full time computational chemist at Sasol Technology R&D, South Africa, where he pursued research projects of an industrial nature.  During the more than 13 years at Sasol he was responsible for the successful management of the Sasol industrial computational chemistry research strategy, resource acquisition (hardware and software), national and international university research collaboration, leading the Sasol computational chemistry group and acted as industry HPC representative.  In 2014 he took up the position of Research Manager at the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC), Cape Town, South Africa, responsible for HPC research application support to users, executing the research support strategy  of the CHPC, supervising the in-­‐house research application scientists and engineers and fulfilling the human capital development (HCD) initiatives of the CHPC.