iHub has said it will shut down its 24 node super computer and shift into the cloud after several months working on the project.
The shut down of the dear project might be shocking but no need to worry as the organization is shifting to the cloud.
iHub’s Community Lead Jimmi Gitonga wrote, “We officially announce the end of the iHub Cluster initiative. It will now be under the iHub Community Infrastructure which includes our other hardware and software systems. We will use the Super Computer hardware for research and training into CPU and GPU hybrid systems and software. This will revolve around parallel programming with areas like OpenCL and HSA being investigated.”
iHub, instead of wasting time on the ambitious supercomputer which requires expensive hardware costs and personell says the a virtual bigger server hosted as a service and paid by use and resources required is the best alternative for the growing tech community and for its partners. And after shifting to the cloud, no one will worry about hardware resources. Shift to the cloud also allows for automation, scalability, agility and on-demand service delivery. So the iHub will offer the cloud as a service to anyone that is interested.
Gitonga adds that with 3 servers from iHub’s corporate partners Intel and Microsoft Kenya, and the help of Kenyan cloud provider Kili.io,Tthe iHub Cloud will be up and running in a matter of weeks.
“The iHub Cloud is only accessible to people who are sitting at the iHub. It is free for an initial period of 6 months. It is built to be a development environment which includes billing and resource management info so that a developer can know what it will cost when the system goes live in production. The iHub has been granted the ability to give a free 6 month period to any iHub member who wants to deploy in a production environment. This means that your system will be accessible across the Internet,” ” Gitonga added.
Started at the end of 2011, iHub felt the need for hardware to help in research and training, offer power-computing services for local content and host parallel and heavy aplications such as for weather prediction, draught prediction and real-time information dispatch. iHub then received an initial funding from Google Africa, then Intel gave them an Intel MultiFlex® Server.
Gitonga, Google Kenya’s Bob Aman and the late Idd Salim began building the first 4 nodes of the then 24 node cluster.