IST Africa Conference 2010

The IST Africa conferenceis taking place in Durban in 2010. More information at http://www.ist-africa.org/conference2010/

Deadlines have been extended for us for the workshop submission (30 November) and paper submission (7 December)

Emerging e-Infrastructures in Southern Africa workshop

We are organising a workshop on emerging e-Infrastructures in Southern Africa. The experience of building SAGrid will serve as the core of the workshop, with several contributions from around the world from other projects collaborating with SAGrid.

Summary of problem domain being addressed

Research infrastructures are key enablers of scientific advancement, leading to breakthroughs in knowledge, understanding of processes and phenomena, emergent behaviour, and more. These infrastructures are of the type of resource which can only be provided at the national or regional level, and have see their best exploitation when they are used by as many researchers or projects as possible. Due to the large investments needed to provide and run these infrastructures, as well as the know-how needed not only to maintain, but to extend the service levels and functionality of these infrastructures.

This aspect inevitably leads to the need to collaborate and co-operate at various levels, from basic technical knowledge sharing, to communications, and sharing of best-methods and real-life experience, etc to the end benefit of the research groups. The nature of infrastructures lends them naturally to usage in cross- or multi-disciplinary work, which has further implications on the need for effective collaboration. This is true no matter whether the infrastructure is of the so-called "hard" kind - fixed installations of specialised equipment such as telescopes, accelerators, microscopes, synchrotrons, etc - or of the so-called "soft" kind. The latter consist of more intangible infrastructures, such as large datasets, frameworks of organisations and cooperation agreements, and so on. So-called "e-Infrastructures" - those providing access to digital services such as high-performance networking, computing, storage, archival, data management, etc - fall into this category. According to the e-Infrastructures Reflection Group (e-IRG) : "The term e-Infrastructure refers to this new research environment in which all researchers - whether working in the context of their home institutions or in national or multinational scientific initiatives - have shared access to unique or distributed scientific facilities (including data, instruments, computing and communications), regardless of their type and location in the world." These e-Infrastructures are enablers for the creation of Global Virtual Research Communities, which will certainly provide solutions to demonstrate that adoption of e-Infrasructures will bring enormous benefit to day-to-day life.

e-Infrastructures and the potential of ICT in general provide the possibility for researchers in Africa to make great leaps in capacity and capability, by deploying these infrastructures for African researchers, based on the experience of similar initiatives in the rest of the world. There is much to learn, but there is also much to be discovered, since this is a fast-paced area of interest, with new technologies being prototype almost continuously. What is more, e-Infrastructures in Africa have enormous potential to re-connect scientific communities of the various diaspora to their home countries and thus assist in bridging the digital divide, through programmes such as that run by UNESCO and Hewlett Packard.

Workshop objectives

With this workshop, we propose to lay the foundation for international and inter-institutional collaboration at several levels, around various aspects of advanced e-Infrastructures for science, technology, industrial and commercial R&D, and education.In concert with several other programmes, we aim to plant the seed for a coherent model for deployment, usage and management of e-Infrastructures in Africa, building on the excellent work of UbuntuNet? , BELIEF, e-IRG and others.

Summary of discussion/tutorial focus and target audience

The workshop will focus on existing experience in the region, focussing on the situation in South Africa as an example of the deployment and management of a national federation of institutes providing a combined resource ecosystem. From the users' perspectives, we aim to provide a clear overview of relevant activities on the continent, making the case for continued and improved support for initiatives supporting network, computing resource deployment, software, middleware, communications and research support.

The target audience :
In order to be useful,l e-Infrastructures must be sustainable and thus need the support of the policy makers who invest money. For the aforementioned reasons in our workshop we tackle and have as key audience also policy makers.
Others will comprise members of projects active in Southern Africa which are either already collaborating or plan to collaborate in order to provide or use e-Infrastructures. These may be

• directors of institutes prodiving or managing resources for existing e-Infrastructures
• experts in the deployment and extension of e-Infrastructures for research
• research leaders in fields which are heavily dependant on e-Infrastructures
• coordinators or managers of projects which have experience in the field
• general user community interested in how to access and use e-Infrastructures in Southern Africa.

Outcomes

• report-back on relevant projects in Latin America (e.g. EELA) and other developing regions which have successfully exploited e-Infrastructures.
• publication of a collection of common activities on the sub-continent which should be followed, relating to e-Infrastructures
• consolidation and documentation of the current state of the South African National Grid and related projects in South Africa, and dissemination of these to interested collaborators in the region.
• a brief introduction to how to use the grid services available in South Africa, open to all delegates, in collaboration with the GILDA t-Infrastructure of EGEE. This will take the form of a few short presentations followed by hands-on exercise.

Current set of contributions

We have contributions in the form of full articles and presentations. The full articles are from

• UCT : sustainable HPC deployment and management
• UFS : experience on running and developing an institutional HPC centre on the grid
• SAGrid : project overview
• SAGrid CA : development of an EUGridPMA? -accredited Certificate Authority for the Southern African Region

• EELA-2 : "Long-term sustainability of regional and global e-Infrastructures"
• BELIEF-II : Lessons learned on engagement and policy impacting e-Infrastructure usage and deployment in Sub-Saharan Africa
• HP/UNESCO : HP/UNESCO "Brain Gain" project overview
• GILDA : Training and User Support : the GILDA t-Infrastructure and activities in Africa
• Meraka : overview of a private cloud for on-demand services for e-Infrastructure

-- BruceBecker - 03 Dec 2009