Senegal is weighing in on revamping the country's innovation capabilities after acquiring and installing an ultra-powerful computer at Cité du savoir in Diamniadio.
The West African country joins the ranks of South Africa and the Ivory Coast that have already been taking advantage of these super powerful machines. Senegal is seeking to make it possible to produce simulations at home from large masses of data.
'The epidemiologists have built a national model for managing the Covid-19 pandemic, but with the supercomputer, they could have made one for each of our fourteen regions', explains Abdou Sene, head of the Innovation and Expertise Center for the development (Foot) within the Virtual University of Senegal.
Since February, Senegal has had this essential tool for carrying out complex simulations, whether they are industrial processes, climatic phenomena or changes in a health situation.
A supercomputer is not simply a fast or very large computer: it works in an entirely different way, typically using parallel processing instead of the serial processing that an ordinary computer uses. Instead of doing one thing at a time, it does many things at once.
The world faces an increasing number of challenges at the local level as well as at the planetary scale.
The convergence of HPC, Big Data and Cloud technologies will allow new applications and services in an increasingly complex scenario where decision-making processes have to be fast and precise to avoid catastrophes.
Supercomputers are in the front line for developing essential public policies, from homeland security to climate action. This is why HPC has become a national priority in U.S.A., Japan or China.
Source : https://taarifa.rw/african-states-quietly-acquiring-supercomputers/
