The rising spread of communicable diseases threatens SAs livelihood and economy, Barrett said. This high-performance computing system will push the limits of scientific discovery to accelerate the creation of treatments and cures.

The computer, created by Intel and HP, provides a resource for SAs bio- and medical informatics community, advancing its genome and statistical analysis research. The supercomputer will initially research HIV vaccine definitions, process image analysis of health-related data and perform protein structure protection analysis.

Intel, together with its partners including HP, has donated technology that can make a huge difference to the important work of the SA bio- and medical informatics community, Hanekom said. This supercomputer provides a scalable solution that can help accelerate finding a cure for harsh diseases, by handling complex data-intensive processing for experiments measuring tens of thousands of data points in hundreds of thousands of samples.

According to Barrett, the supercomputer uses a cluster of 32 dual-processor servers powered by Intel Itanium 2 processors, 32 dual-processor servers with Intel Xeon processors, and a Red Hat Linux Advanced Server. The system performs at a theoretical peak of 870bn floating point operations per second (gigaFLOP/s).