IBM Develops $2.5bn Super Computer For
Kenya
January 15, 2015 | Filed under: Business ,
Featured | Posted by: Editorial_Staff
z13 super computer


AFRICANGLOBE– Kenya’s eCommerce ecosystem is set to see greater efficiencies as IBM has launched what it has dubbed the‘most powerful and secure system ever built.’
The z13 mainframe is an impressive demonstration of human ingenuity, technological advancement, and the monumental cost in terms of time and money – five years and a whopping $2.5 billion. Constructed with the burgeoning Kenyan mobile economy in mind, this super computer is the first system able to process 2.5 billion transactions per day. To say that this is extraordinary is an understatement considering that Kenya’s total transactions in the whole of 2014 amounted to 825 million raking in Sh2 trillion ($21.9 billion), a mere 33 percent of what the new super computer can do in a day. “In addition to real-time encryption, the mainframe delivers analytics to help meet the expectations of consumers for speed and safety for trillions of transactions in the mobile economy,” said IBM in a statement at the launch of the system, the development of which involved 60 clients and included 500 patents including cryptographic encryption technologies. Customers have become notoriously demanding as they see more and more of the potentials embedded in recent technological advancements. The expectation now is that mobile applications be super-fast and seamless, and this is without regard or appreciation to the back end processes that drive their requests. It is trends like these that justify the investments and efforts that go into producing technological wonders like the z13. Experts believe mobile transactions will continue to leapfrog, possibly hitting the 40 trillion transactions per day mark by 2025. “Every time a consumer makes a purchase or hits refresh on a smart phone, it can create a cascade of events on the back end of the computing environment. The z13 is designed to handle billions of transactions for the mobile economy. Only the IBM mainframe can put the power of the world’s most secure
datacenters in the palm of your hand,” said Tom Rosamilia, senior vice president, IBM Systems. According to IBM, the z13 features the world’s fastest microprocessor which is 2 times faster than the most common server processors and contains 300 percent more memory storage. As a result, the z13 transaction engine is able to analyze transactions in real time and prevent fraud as it is occurring, thus alerting and allowing financial institutions to halt the transaction before the deed is done. The z13 leverages the cloud architecture which has become something of a legend because of its ability to scale and reliably handle multiple workloads in a secure fashion. In a scale-out model, it is capable of running up to 8,000 virtual servers – more than 50 virtual servers per core, helping to lower software, energy and facilities costs. Such super computers will soon be in high demand as the rest of Africa is sure to pick up on the digital race.

Africa developing its first supercomputer outside South Africa The first 24-node HPC cluster should launch at iHub in Nairobi this summer. by Curt Hopkins - May 24, 2012 9:42pm AST 34 "Outside of South Africa, there is little to no capacity for cloud computing on the continent," wrote Erik Hersman on his blog, White African. "This means that few of the programmers in this region have the skill sets necessary to work and build out this infrastructure. We have a severely limited foundation on which to build future services in an increasingly cloud-based computing world." Hersman is co-founder of the iHub and the crisis mapping software outfit Ushahidi. Steps have now been taken that will lead to HPC capability, creating a 24-node cluster that will come online at Kenya's fantastic iHub idea factory this summer. Google Africa has provided capital for the initial deployment, and Intel has provided a MultiFlex server to act as the HPC's master component. The iHub Cluster, as it has become known, was the brainchild of iHub member Idd Salim . Google's Bob Aman, who holds "office hours" at iHub, and Jimmy Gitonga are helping Salim build the computer's first four nodes. "The iHub Cluster will be for people to learn what goes on under the hood of HPCs by building it," wrote Hersman, "and to learn how to use the power in it to solve big data problems. It will also be made available to the animation and ad agencies in town for rendering services." Among the reasons Hersman provided for the creation of such a supercomputer were the following: Research and training opportunities Training people to be SREs (Service Reliability Engineers) Power-computing services for local content A host for parallel and resource-hungry applications such as weather prediction, drought prediction and real-time information dispatch Hersman says the project has both the "leadership in place to run them and the resources to build them out." The cluster, along with another project (the UX Lab, which aims to improve the user experience and design of African-coded software and Web projects), will reside at the iHub. Africa is one of the most exciting places in the world today for innovation and growth. The technological imaginations of Africans are growing to a point where they are taking ownership of building the tools to serve that imagination. Man, it's fun to watch. But south Africans already have 1 build for them, Kenya is now building its first supercomputer while SA is looking to upgrade its existing and only 1.

The fastest supercomputer is in China, the Tianhe-2, and runs at about 33.86 petaflops. Many countries say they intend to break the exaflop barrier in the next few decades. For some context, your single-core 2.5GHz PC has a theoretical performance of 10 gigaflops. Tianhe-2 is more than a million times faster than your computer. Although South Africa's supercomputer, based at the Centre for High Performance Computing is in the top 500 fastest supercomputers in the world, it is not one of the front-runners in the field. However, on Wednesday, Team South Africa "made jaws drop" at the International Student Cluster Challenge in Germany when the first-time entrant trumped all the other teams, including two from the United States and two from China, the Centre for High Performance Computing said. The centre co-ordinated the student team. "In a real-time challenge, teams of six undergraduate and/or high school students build small clusters of their own design on the [International Supercomputing Conference] exhibit floor and race to demonstrate the greatest performance across a series of benchmarks and applications,"
the centre said. The South African team received the highest aggregate scores in the competition. Supercomputing has become a South African focus, given the country's status as one of the hosts of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), a giant radio telescope that will straddle both Africa and Australia. SKA South Africa project director Bernie Fanaroff has said that the SKA will generate more raw data in one week than human kind has created in its entire existence. Supercomputers will be required to crunch this data, and the country is trying to position itself as a player in this arena. Referring to the student competition, the centre said: "The experience will assist South Africa grow a generation of high performance expertise for national economic development and for large projects such as the SKA."

All african scientists are welcome to do research in Kenya, if you are also a tech expert watch this space

Good for Africa and African plus the World

I want to see what comes from all this horsepower...

$2.5billion dollars! ,Kenya you've been scamed!!

tartar9:
$2.5billion dollars! ,Kenya you've been scamed!!

If it's hard to believe doesn't mean we've been scammed oga, in fact the computer is being built by kenyan and IBM scientists