South Africa has approved 292 million rand, about $18.2 million, for a new supercomputer. The funding will replace the aging Lengau system. Notably, the decision comes just months after hackers broke into Lengau and used it to mine cryptocurrency.
Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation Blade Nzimande confirmed the funding. He shared the news in a written response to a parliamentary question. The question came from Umkhonto Wesizwe party MP Thembinkosi Mjadu. According to Nzimande, the new system will run at 4 petaflops. That is roughly three times more powerful than Lengau, which currently operates at 1.3 petaflops.
The National Integrated Cyberinfrastructure System, known as NICIS, will oversee the transition. However, the budget will not go toward hardware alone. It will also fund human resources, governance, and research. So far, officials have not said how much of the $18.2 million will go directly into buying the new machine.
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Nzimande called Lengau a “legacy environment.” He explained that some parts are aging. Many are no longer fully supported by the original vendors. As a result, that weakness is what allowed hackers to breach the system between May and June this year. Attackers gained unauthorized access. They then deployed crypto-mining malware on parts of the cluster, according to a report by technext24. Still, the minister stressed that only certain components were affected. The wider national cyberinfrastructure remained secure.
This was not an isolated incident either. In fact, reports indicate Lengau was hacked twice in the same week in late May. The attacks forced administrators to shut the system down. They had to re-image the affected nodes before bringing it back online. User credentials and private keys were also likely compromised. Because of this, the incident had to be reported to South Africa’s data protection regulator under POPIA.
The timing matters here. South Africa has faced a wave of cyberattacks in recent months. Standard Bank, Liberty, Statistics South Africa, and Wits University all reported breaches. Meanwhile, a recent Surfshark analysis ranked the country among the most breached in the world this year. Given this backdrop, the Lengau upgrade looks less like routine maintenance. Instead, it looks like a necessary response to a growing threat.
Lengau has served as the backbone of South African science for a decade. It debuted on the Top500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers in June 2016. At the time, it was the most powerful machine on the African continent. Named after the Setswana word for cheetah, it replaced an earlier system called Tsessebe. It launched 15 times faster than its predecessor.
Over the years, Lengau has powered research well beyond routine number crunching. For example, scientists have used it for weather modelling, seismic studies, drug discovery, and fluid dynamics. It also supported work tied to the Square Kilometre Array Observatory and the MeerKAT telescope. During the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers even relied on it to process SARS-CoV-2 gene sequencing data.
Nzimande said the rollout will happen in phases. This approach will help keep national research services running during the transition. Phase one is expected to go live by the end of November this year. Then, the full upgrade should finish by the end of March 2027, according to the minister.
For now, South African researchers will keep relying on Lengau while the new system comes online. Ultimately, officials hope the upgrade will close the gaps hackers exploited earlier this year. At the same time, it should give the country’s scientific community a real boost in computing power.
