DIT organised a research seminar titled “The Application of High Performance Computing (HPC)in Africa with a case study in South Africa.” This event took place on July 17, 2015. More than 70 participants attended the event that included University of Dar-es-Salaam (UDSM), Open University of Tanzania (OUT), St. Joseph University in Tanzania (SJUIT), Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences (MUHAS), Dar-es-Salaam Institute of Technology (DIT), and University of Dodoma (UDOM). A good number of female students from UDSM, SJUIT and DIT were invited to encourage women joining engineering fields, especially the computational related subjects.

DIT’s Principal Prof John Kondoro made welcomed participants. All the presentations and some photos are available on (http://coeict.ac.tz/ hpctalk/.)

It was noted that the biggest challenge could be that most prospective users lack the basic knowledge of HPC, thus there is need to start some trainings. Prof. Cress noted that in SA, HPC usage has the following

The need for HPC

1. HPC usage is encouraged through provision of research funds to researchers

2. Her experience was that it is easy to run a messy code on HPC than asking researchers to re-write good optimised codes for parallel programming.

3. CHPC would be glad to ask their researchers to assist Tanzania colleagues working in the same field to acquire HPC skills or use specialized software available at CHPC.

4. They will look at the possibility of extending their summer school to Tanzanian students