The central High Performance Computer (HPC) Cluster, which provides researchers with an extremely powerful processing platform, has undergone several upgrades. The 2014 upgrade brought much needed features, improved parallel processing capabilities, and enhanced support for the latest and fastest hardware.

The long-standing NWU HPC strategy provides recognition to the four different levels of computational research facilities namely:

• Level 1: Personal workstation
• Level 2: Department Compute Cluster
• Level 3: Institutional HPC
• Level 4: Nat HPC

In a partnership with the Physics department, started in 2013, additional capacity and Infiniband capabilities were added to the central HPC to support their research needs for the duration of 2014. We have built on this partnership with the Physics department to extend their departmental cluster and accommodate their requirements. This cluster has already given their astrophysics research a welcome boost.

Due to the speed of technology and the ever increasing demand of researchers we are continually monitoring the capacity of the Institutional HPC in order to plan for possible upgrades. The HPC capacity is currently being evaluated and may lead to another upgrade near the end of 2015.

24 July 2015