University to help in data research

“This Data Intensive Research Facility will be a platform for developing innovative approaches to research with big data that will enable South African researchers in astronomy and bioinformatics to compete with the best in the world,” project leader, Professor Russ Taylor, said.

Taylor is a SKA Research Chair at two of the Consortium Universities (UCT and UWC) and Director of the new Inter-University Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy.

This facility will serve as a tier 2 node (regional) of the greater cyberinfrastructure system which will include national infrastructure (tier 1), regional infrastructure (tier 2) and institutional infrastructure (tier 3). All three tiers are proposed to be integrated to develop national capacity for the management of big data in major scientific projects.

“The Western Cape Data Intensive Research Facility is the first regional data node in the national integrated cyberinfrastructure proposed by the Department of Science and Technology,” Dr Dale Peters, interim director of UCT eResearch, pointed out.

“The award will leverage the considerable investment made by UCT in data centre capacity and eResearch expertise towards the establishment of a regional consortium that will drive the transition of research practice and develop support services for data intensive research.”

The consortium will – in collaboration with South African academic, government and private sector and international collaborators and partners – undertake technical research and development programmes for: development of precursor global SKA SA regional science and data centres; development of a prototype African Data Intensive Research Cloud technologies; portals and software platforms and tools for research and analytics on big data; systems and solutions for research data management and open access; and federation of the tier 2 facility with tier 3 infrastructures at collaborating institutions and with tier 1 national services and infrastructure within the Data Intensive Research Initiative of South Africa (DIRISA).

“The University of Cape Town is an international leader in the field of astronomy and bioinformatics. However, both fields are severely challenged by an onslaught of data from new sensor technologies,” Professor Danie Visser, Deputy Vice Chancellor for Research and Internationalisation at UCT, said.

He added that during the course of this year, the MeerKAT telescope will begin to produce data sets that must be processed and mined for science.

“In bioinformatics, the growth of data from rapidly advancing gene-sequencing technologies drives a similar data problem. A data intensive research facility designed and operated by a team of researchers and eResearch specialists is essential to enable discovery in this new era of research.”

Currently, NICIS consists of the Centre for High Performance Computing, the South African National Research Network and the Data Intensive Research Initiative of South Africa (DIRISA). These are all managed by the CSIR Meraka Institute.