South Africa's Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) has downplayed the impact of allegations of maladministration and corruption concerning the state contract for its now functional Lengau supercomputer.

In early June the CSIR unveiled a petaflops (PFLOPs) machine which the organisation claims is the fastest computer on the African continent due to its speed of roughly one petaflops (1000 teraflops). Flops are units for measuring of computer's processing speed.

"This is a supercomputer with processing speed capable of a thousand-trillion floating point operations per second. Floating point operations or flops are used in computing to calculate extremely large numbers,"revealed the CSIR in its presentation of the computer which features over 40 000 cores making it 15 times faster than the previous system.

Barely a month later and an amaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism report, initially published by Daily Maverick and further reported on by ITWeb, outgoing CSIR CEO Sibusiso Sibisi accused South Africa's Minister of Science and Technology Naledi Pandor and the department's director-general Phil Mjwara of "attempts to subvert internal procurement processes".

The accusation is outlined in a five-page letter penned by Sibisi and sent to colleagues on 22 June.

However, Tendani Tsedu, Media Relations Manager at the CSIR told ITWeb Africa that the petaflops machine will remain in service. "Everything was done according to the CSIR processes. What the CEO mentions in the letter was not carried through, we did not divert from our practices, we did not change anything to fit anyone, we followed the right procedures and that contract stays and there is nothing that is going to change."

Tsedu also referred to the usefulness of the device for all of Africa, not just South Africa, when it comes to high-performance computing and advanced data technologies.

The supercomputer was ranked 121st among the world's TOP500 supercomputers at the International Supercomputing Conference which took place in Frankfurt, Germany late last month.

The machine is housed at the centre for High Performance Computing in Cape Town.