South African Centre for High Performance Computing Established in 2007, the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) in South Africa currently has about 1,000 users from academia and industry. The center supports research from across a number of domains and participates in a number of large-scale international projects, such as CERN and the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) radio telescope project. The SKA Readiness Project is one such project; it aims to distribute HPC equipment to the eight African partner countries that will be hosting SKA together with South Africa. These systems will be used for training and preparation for the data processing requirements associated with SKA. SKA Africa partner countries have already received HPC systems from three supercomputers during the first phase of deployment, including racks from TACC's Ranger system. The second phase of the SKA Readiness started in 2018, with the contribution and distribution of portions of TACC's Stampede system.
Dallas Federal Reserve The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas is exploring ways in which high performance computing might add value in support of their mission with 20 racks from Stampede. The Dallas Fed has limited space available for a cluster of this size in their existing compute space, and so they partnered with another organization to house their system. This highlights some of the challenges that organizations face when beginning to seriously explore the application of high performance computing in their business.
Individual Researchers Many individual academic departments and researchers have also taken part in the TACC Legacy program, often with only a single rack of servers. Systems of this size don't require additional switches to interconnect nodes (beyond what is already contained in a rack), and have power and cooling demands that can often be satisfied in existing small computer rooms. At the same time these small systems can have an outsized impact on the productivity of individual researchers, and can form the basis for growth to much larger numerical simulations.