Centre for High Performance Computing 2025 National Conference

30 Nov 2025, 08:00 → 3 Dec 2025, 22:20 Africa/Johannesburg

Century City Convention Centre

The 19th CHPC National Conference.

The aim of the conference: to bring together our users so that their work can be communicated, to include world renowned experts, and to offer a rich programme for students, in the fields of high performance computing, big data, and high speed networking.  The CHPC National Conference is co-organised by the CHPC, DIRISA and SANReN.

Cape Town

The CHPC 2025 Conference will be an in-person event with a physical programme hosted at the Century City Conference Centre, Cape Town.

For more information please see the main conference site.

From Data to Decisions: Leveraging Cyber-Infrastructure

This year's theme is the utility of cyber-infrastructure in processing, storing and moving the large data sets underpinning today's complex world.

Programme

• 30 November: Workshops
• 1–3 December: Conference

Evening Social Events

• Monday 1 December: Conference Dinner 
• Tuesday 2 December: Poster Showcase Cocktails [Exhibition Hall]
• Wednesday 3 December: Awards Dinner 

Registration

Online registration will close on Friday 27 November 2025. Thereafter only onsite registration (at full fees) will be available at the venue.

Co-Organisers

 

 

Sponsors

Diamond

 

Platinum

 

 

Gold

 

     

application-1-2025-workshop.docx csir_client_registration_information.docx Outstanding_payment_letter_2025_WJvR.pdf Privacy-Notice-for-events.pdf

Sunday, 30 November

08:00 → 09:00 Registration

09:00 → 10:30 SADC Cyber-Infrastructure Meeting

SADC Cyber-Infrastructure Meeting

09:00 → 10:30 Workshop: W1 [TBA]

10:30 → 11:00 Break

11:00 → 12:30 SADC Cyber-Infrastructure Meeting

SADC Cyber-Infrastructure Meeting

11:00 → 12:30 Workshop

12:30 → 13:30 Lunch

13:30 → 15:00 SADC Cyber-Infrastructure Meeting

SADC Cyber-Infrastructure Meeting

13:30 → 15:00 Workshop

15:00 → 15:30 Break

15:30 → 17:00 SADC Cyber-Infrastructure Meeting

SADC Cyber-Infrastructure Meeting

15:30 → 17:00 Workshop

17:00 → 18:00 Intermission

Monday, 1 December

08:00 → 09:00 Registration

09:00 → 10:30 Keynote: Opening

Convener: Chair: Mr Mervyn Christoffels (CHPC)

09:00 Welcome

Speaker: Chair: Mr Mervyn Christoffels (CHPC)

09:05 DSI Welcome

Speaker: Mr Charles Mokonoto (Department of Science and Technology)

09:15 CSIR Welcome

Speaker: Dr Lulama Wakaba

09:25 NICIS Welcome

Speaker: Dr Happy Sithole (CHPC)

09:45 Cyberinfrastructure Collaboration: Towards Accelerated Impact - The Role of Being a Good Ancestor

In the rapidly evolving landscape of High-Performance Computing (HPC), the theme of "Cyberinfrastructure Collaboration: Towards Accelerated Impact" underscores the critical need for synergistic efforts to drive innovation and societal progress. This keynote presentation will explore the profound concept of being a "good ancestor" and its pivotal role in shaping impactful cyberinfrastructure collaborations.

As we delve into the intricacies of HPC, we must recognize that our technological advancements are not just for the present but are legacies for future generations. Being a good ancestor involves making conscientious decisions that prioritize sustainability, ethical considerations, and long-term benefits over short-term gains. This perspective encourages us to build resilient and adaptable cyberinfrastructures that can withstand the test of time and evolving challenges.

The presentation will highlight key strategies for fostering effective collaborations that embody the principles of good ancestry. These include:

1. Sustainable Design and Development: Emphasizing eco-friendly practices and energy-efficient technologies to minimize environmental impact.
2. Ethical Data Management: Ensuring data privacy, security, and equitable access to information.
3. Inclusive Innovation: Promoting diversity and inclusivity in research and development to harness a wide range of perspectives and talents.
4. Long-term Vision: Planning and implementing projects with a foresight that considers future societal needs and potential technological advancements.

By integrating these principles, we can create a cyberinfrastructure that accelerates current impact and lays a robust foundation for future generations. This approach enhances the immediate benefits of our collaborations and ensures that we leave a positive and enduring legacy.

Speaker: Mr Warren Hero*

10:30 → 11:00 Refreshment Break

11:00 → 12:30 HPC Applications: 1

11:00 Entangled Worlds: Engineering, Physics, Applied Mathematics, and the Future of High-Performance Computing.

The presentation will discuss the use of traditional computational methods, machine and deep learning, as well as quantum computing and quantum machine learning (as a new frontier) in addressing challenges in fluid dynamics, dynamical systems, and high-energy physics research. And the talk will highlight the role of the CHPC in democratising access to critical resources and the enablement of such research.

Speaker: Muaaz Bhamjee (University of Johannesburg)

11:20 Is it Time to Switch to Machine Learnt Potentials?

For over two decades I have been developing new interatomic potentials, e.g., implemented the AOM within GULP that can be employed to model non-spherical Jahn Teller Mn(III) ions, successfully refined potential parameters to model numerous systems including the Peierls' phase transition of VO₂, and I am the author of a published interatomic potential parameter database. My interest is driven by the ability to control what physics is included (or not) by the introduction of new terms to the Hamiltonian (or potential energy) and it is an approach many will follow as, compared to DFT, it allows for modelling systems of larger sizes (more atoms), greater time periods (in MD), and more sampling (global optimisation and/or calculating the partition function).

Now ML potentials, which have many more parameters to refine and a minefield of differing functional forms to choose, have become very topical as data required to fit these as well as computer resources have become more readily available. My first real experience came with one of my earlier PhD students discovering that it was not straightforward to develop a suitable model (fit parameters), for example, the GAP ML potentials we have refined suffered from the erroneous oscillations.

I lead UK's Materials Chemistry Consortium and one of our current aims is to make the use of ML potentials more accessible to our community. Simultaneously, other groups have begun refining ML-Potential models for the entire Periodic table based on reproducing DFT results. In my presentation I will present results from three of my PGT students who worked on energy materials using the JANUS-core code to calculate the energy and forces, based on pre-refined MACE ML-Potentials. Moreover, I will include recently published results on dense and microporous silica materials where these potentials performed particularly well and further results of ongoing research from the MCC.

Speaker: Scott Woodley (University College London)

12:20 Q&A

Q&A

Speaker: Q&A

11:00 → 12:30 HPC Technology

11:00 → 12:30 ISSA: Cybersecurity

11:00 → 12:30 Special: Quantum Computing

12:30 → 13:30 Lunch

13:30 → 15:00 HPC Applications: 2

13:30 The Impact and Benefits of Partnering for Operational Weather Forecast Continuity

The South African Weather Service (SAWS) operates under the SAWS Act (Act No. 8 of 2001), which mandates it to provide essential weather forecasts and warnings to safeguard lives and property. To meet this mandate, SAWS runs numerical weather prediction (NWP) models on its high-performance computing (HPC) system to simulate atmospheric processes.

The current NWP configurations generate high-resolution weather forecasts for the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region (with a 4.4 km grid spacing) and South Africa (1.5 km grid spacing). Both models are run concurrently four times daily, providing forecasts up to three days ahead. These outputs support weather-sensitive sectors and stakeholders, including aviation, marine services, and disaster management.

In November 2023, SAWS relocated its head office, necessitating the transfer of critical operational systems, including the HPC infrastructure. Central to the success was the collaboration with the Centre for High-Performance Computing (CHPC). The two entities have a long-standing Memorandum of Agreement (MoA) that grants SAWS near real-time access to computational resources and backup services in case of HPC failures. This redundancy allows SAWS to maintain a significant component of weather forecasting services with minimal disruptions. Once the HPC was disabled for transfer, a mirror of the SADC (4.4 km) configuration was activated immediately on CHPC’s Lengau system. Months of meticulous planning, rigorous backup and failover testing, and continuous coordination between the teams ensured this smooth transition of NWP operations.

The effectiveness of this failover approach underscored the critical importance of resilient and redundant HPC resources in sustaining continuous forecasting operations. The seamless collaboration between SAWS and CHPC ensured uninterrupted service, emphasising the critical roles of high-performance computing and partnerships in delivering essential meteorological services across South Africa.

Speaker: Ms Stephanie Landman* (South African Weather Service)

CHPCconf2024-Abstract.0-SAWS_StephanieLandman.pdf

13:50 Computational modelling of functional materials and chemical reactivity using molecular dynamics, DFT and wave-function-based approaches

Quantum chemical methods, in particular, those based on density functional theory (DFT), can be successfully used to achieve a mechanistic understanding of reactivity at the microscopic level, which is required to optimise functional materials (such as catalysts, electrocatalysts, semiconductors, optoelectronic materials) with respect to their target properties.

The presentation will highlight the various research topics and achievements of the research programme led by L. Moskaleva at UFS. Our research applies the tools of computational chemistry to study phenomena such as gas-phase reactions, reactions in solution and at solid surfaces.

We apply DFT methods, wave-function based methods, ab initio molecular dynamics (AIMD) simulations, and microkinetic modelling to study material properties and complex reaction mechanisms, either in the gas phase, or on various solid transition-metal catalysts, including rare earth oxides and coinage metals, in particular on Au-Ag alloys. Our research efforts have been largely focused on nanoporous gold (np-Au), a novel catalyst proposed for environmentally friendly applications but also an interesting material from the point of view of fundamental research on gold. Since the discovery of the catalytic activity of gold at the nanoscale, as opposed to the very inert bulk Au, there has been an ongoing debate in the scientific community, as to whether gold on its own (without any support material) can be catalytically active. Our research has contributed to this scientific debate and related questions about the interplay between the topology, composition, and catalytic properties of alloyed nanostructures.

We also work on the topics related to chemical kinetics of hydrocarbon combustion and on functional materials, such as luminescent organometallic complexes. In collaboration with experimentalists, we have computationally characterised a series of luminescent binuclear Au-Au complexes with N-substituted bis(diphenylphosphino)amine ligands. Our time-dependent density functional theory (TDDFT) calculations provided valuable insights into the interpretation of the photophysical properties of the complexes, highlighting the phosphorescent nature of the emission and explaining the differences in emission wavelengths observed between complexes with different counterions.

We are grateful to the CHPC for providing state-of-the-art computing facilities that allow us to use computational chemistry software and perform sophisticated calculations of molecular and crystalline systems.

Speaker: Prof. Lyudmila Moskaleva* (University of the Free State)

14:10 Unravelling plant-biotic/abiotic stress using computational biology and bioinformatics tools.

Major discoveries in molecular biology, along with advances in bioinformatics technologies, have resulted in an exponential increase in the biological data supplied by the scientific community over the past few decades. Genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics are four of the techniques that have impacted studies in plant-biotic/abiotic stress. When used singly, each of these procedures can generate a massive amount of data, however, when utilized together, they have the potential to fully dissect a system at the transcriptional and translational levels.

Our research focuses on understanding interactions between plants and biotic/abiotic factors for resistance/tolerance breeding purposes in crops such as cassava, wheat, sweetpotato and common bean, among others. The use computational biology and bioinformatics can enhance an understanding of plant-stress responses and aid in the development of stress-resistant/tolerant plants. These advancements can boost yields, increase agricultural productivity, and enhance global food security. Access to computing resources such as the CHPC is needed to achieve these results, hence, the presentation will showcase studies that were achieved using these tools, including the ongoing and future studies.

Speaker: Dr Molemi Rauwane* (Nelson Mandela University)

14:30 Fitting Classical Forcefields Programmatically for Application in Molecular Dynamics Simulations

Experiments rely on models and theory to study the properties of physical systems. Consequently, computer experiments or simulations complement experiments and have enabled theoretical studies of properties of physical systems through the implementation of models and theory. Interatomic potentials have been successfully applied to computational studies involving up to millions of atoms. Obtaining interatomic potentials for a particular material typically involves fitting parameters of an analytical function such as the Buckingham to reproduce experimental properties of that material. Finding good parameters out of billions of possible parameter combinations makes obtaining good interatomic potentials very time-consuming and could take up to a year or more. We have recently developed a program which greatly simplifies the process of fitting Buckingham interatomic potentials and greatly reduces fitting time to a few weeks. The program implements the OpenMPI framework enabling it to run on high-performance computing systems on any number of processors. The core of the fitting algorithm is an error variable akin to a cost function in machine learning which allowed to program to intuitively optimize the interatomic potential parameters. When compared to experimental properties, preliminary fitting performed on cubic Li2O with space group FM3-M yielded percentage differences of -0.59 % for lattice parameters a, b, and c, -0.04 % for the bulk modulus, 0.00 %, 0.00 %, -63.39 % for the elastic constants C12, C12 and C44, and -29.35 % the static dielectric constant. These results were obtained by running the program on 24 processors for 4 days on a high-performance computing system.

Speaker: Dr Kenneth Kgatwane (University of Limpopo)

14:50 Q&A

Q&A

Speaker: Q&A

13:30 → 15:00 HPC Technology

13:30 → 15:00 ISSA: Cybersecurity

13:30 → 15:00 Special: Quantum Computing

15:00 → 15:30 Break

15:30 → 17:00 Keynote: Industry Inquisition

Convener: Facilitator: Mr Dan Olds (OrionX)

15:30 A Brief Tour of Your Data Center Future

In this informative and fast-moving presentation, long-time industry analyst Dan Olds conducts a whirlwind trip discussing why the HPC/AI market is increasingly difficult to measure and highlights new technologies that will help data centers deal with rapidly increasing compute demand. Spoiler alert: he declares air cooling dead and explains why. As his big finish, Olds boldly declares that the only way forward for data centers is to become radically more efficient. Not just talk about it, but actually do it.

Speaker: Mr Dan Olds* (Olds Research)

15:50 Industry Inquisition

This session has become a signature event at CHPC conferences. The rules are brutally simple. Vendors have five minutes and only three slides to put their best foot forward to the audience and the inquisitors. The panel includes industry analyst Dan Olds along with two standout students from the cluster competition who have been briefed on the vendors and their slides.

After their five-minute presentations, the presenters will be asked three questions, two of which they know are coming followed by a final, secret, question. Frank and tough questions will be asked. Answers will be given. Punches will not be pulled. The audience will be the ultimate judge of which vendor did the best job. It’s fun, brisk, and informative.

Speaker: Mr Dan Olds (Olds Research)

17:00 → 17:45 Keynote

Convener: Chair: Dr Happy Sithole (CHPC)

17:00 Challenges and Opportunities of HPC in the age of AI

Large scale AI applications are drivers for the design and deployment of the next generation of supercomputers. While large language model training and generative AI applications take the headlines, scientific workloads are starting to utilize AI as algorithmic extensions to their existing implementations. We will discuss how the needs between these communities differ, how system software and system middleware need to develop to support these use cases, and hopefully demonstrate how once again supercomputing turns compute-bound problems into I/O-bound problems.

Speaker: Dr Utz-Uwe Haus* (HPE HPC/AI EMEA Research Lab (ERL))

17:45 → 18:00 Intermission

18:00 → 19:30 Conference Dinner

Tuesday, 2 December

08:00 → 09:00 Registration

09:00 → 10:30 Keynote: Tuesday

09:00 Building global federated infrastructure in the R&E community

Trust is the basis for any human and technical interaction. Research collaborations have been sharing resources and data for decades; however the open science wave is pushing to make scientific research and its underlying data more accessible to all levels of society,

This talk explores how trust is established in research collaborations and infrastructures and how Authentication and Authorisation Infrastructures (AAIs) allow authorised users to access shared resources. Examples of these AAIs, along with lessons learned are provided for the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and EuroHPC.

Speaker: Ms Licia Florio* (NORDUnet)

09:45 Cyber Intelligence at Scale: Risk Evaluation of DNS as Critical infrastructure

The domain name system, or DNS, is a critical component of the Internet ecosystem we use. Almost every single transaction and connection from email to online commerce makes use of DNS as an initial a fundamental step. While the primary purpose in the eyes of the public is to mask the complexities of host addressing, and location, it’s use has evolved to be critical for a whole lot more, One of the oldest and arguably the second most important use being its foundation for email delivery though the use of MX records. In recent years we have seen the introduction and gradual adoption of several security measures rooted within and implemented by extending the DNS protocol. These include DNSSEC, SPF, and more recently CAA for improving e the security of SSL certificate issuance. In essence the global domain Domain Name Systems should be regarded as critical infrastructure. However, for many organisations, especially those reliant on hosting providers, ISPs or MSPs, despite the requirement for functional DNS, the deployment and operation of the servers (as outlined in RFC 2182) and associated domain zones, are often neglected. This may be due to the ‘care and feeding’ been seen as 'too complex', mundane or unexciting in comparison to more exciting areas with ‘Cyber operations’ such as Threat Intelligence, Malware Analysis and ML/AI based security solutions. The irony is these all have a strong dependence on DNS!

This talk has a dual focus initially presents an overview of the state of DNS operations for several ccTLD’s and top domains globally. A concern worth raising particularly considering the increased global geopolitical tensions is where is ones DNS hosted physically and logically, and who has control? An evaluation of risk, particularly the dependency on key providers (for example about a third of the .no domains surveyed are hosted by a single provider), as well as adherence to good practice is presented. The secondary part of the talk presents several short case studies of the adoption rate of security functionality (primarily the adoption of DNSSEC and CAA records) within and offered by DNS for ccTLDs investigated.

The final element is a discussion about undertaking research such as this at ‘internet scale’, including data collection, processing storage and validation.

Speaker: Prof. Barry Irwin* (Noroff University)

10:30 → 11:00 Break

11:00 → 12:30 HPC Applications

12:30 → 13:30 Lunch

13:30 → 15:00 HPC Applications

15:00 → 15:30 Break

15:30 → 17:00 HPC Applications

17:00 → 17:15 Intermission

17:15 → 19:15 Poster: Cocktails Poster Showcase

Cocktails Poster Session

Wednesday, 3 December

08:00 → 09:00 Registration

09:00 → 10:30 Keynote: Wednesday

09:00 Intel AI in Action at the 2024 Olympics: Deployments and Benefits for your Business

Intel has already put a lot of “AI in action”. Come and hear about some of the use cases that were deployed at scale during the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games. You will be blown away with the capabilities and their results ! And the session will also deliver some details about the technologies and features of the Intel ingredients that are in these use case solutions, as well as look at the new Intel AI ingredients and solutions.

Speaker: Dr Jean-Laurent Philippe* (Intel)

09:45 Tackling the Challenges of Reproducibility and Data Sharing in Computational Science

Research and discovery are increasingly computation, data-intensive, interdisciplinary, and collaborative. However, reproducing results remains a significant challenge. Scholarly publications are often disconnected from the data and software that produced the results, making reproducibility difficult. Researchers today generate vast amounts of data, code, and software tools that need to be shared, but sharing data remains challenging, especially when data is large or sensitive. Moreover, funding agencies are increasingly requiring sharing data used to generate results, yet data is only valuable if it is reproducible. A key challenge is that reproducible artifacts are typically created only after the research is complete, hindered by a lack of standards and insufficient motivation. Despite growing recognition of the importance of reproducibility, the research community still lacks comprehensive tools and platforms to support reproducible practices throughout the research cycle, as well as a culture that educates and trains researchers on the topic.

This presentation will introduce SHARED (Secure Hub for Access, Reliability, and Exchange of Data), a new initiative at the University of Chicago to develop a comprehensive platform for data-driven research and data management. We will discuss the challenges and opportunities of reproducibility in computational research and strategies for capturing reproducible artifacts throughout the research process. Additionally, we will share progress on building a community of practice to democratize reproducibility in scientific research.

Speaker: Prof. Hakizumwami Birali Runesha* (University of Chicago)

10:30 → 11:00 Break

11:00 → 12:30 HPC Applications

12:30 → 13:30 Lunch

13:30 → 15:00 HPC Applications

15:00 → 15:30 Break

15:30 → 17:00 HPC Applications

17:00 → 18:30 Canapes & Cocktails Networking Session

18:30 → 19:15 Keynote: Closing

Convener: Chair: Dr Happy Sithole (CHPC)

18:30 The Third Pillar of HPC

The advent of Exascale computing in 2022 marks a major milestone in HPC but also demonstrates its limitations for future progress. Historically, conventional MPP (and large commodity clusters) have achieved enhanced performance by a factor of 2 every two years. In addition to CPUs, GPUs have extended this through streaming SIMD computations for certain classes of application algorithms. But the end of Moore’s Law as well as Dennard Scaling is severely constraining future progress, especially with respect to cost as Frontier approaches 8,000 square feet and only one other, Aurora, has been announced since then. The major class of supercomputer computation not adequately addressed is that of dynamic adaptive graph processing required for advanced forms of machine intelligence; hence, the third pillar of computation. Graphs exhibit neither much spatial locality nor temporal locality but suggest what may be called “logical locality” as the data structures explicitly define their own topologies. However, a new approach to computer architecture, a non-von Neumann family, that is both dynamic and adaptive can easily provide an order of magnitude performance to cost advantage over current methods. While this form of improvement is particularly advantageous for dynamic graph processing, it also can enhance more typical matrix processing. This closing Keynote address will introduce the foundational concepts of the Active Memory Architecture which is being pursued by the Texas Advanced Computing Center. Questions will be addressed from the participants throughout the presentation.

Speaker: Prof. Thomas Sterling* (TACC)

19:15 → 21:30 Awards