The Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) will invest R60-million over three years on the establishment of two projects – a national e-science teaching and training platform and a regional data centre – with the aim of expanding South Africa's cyberinfrastructure by furthering the implementation of the National Integrated Cyberinfrastructure System (NICIS).

The University of the Witwatersrand will lead a consortium to establish the national e-science teaching and training platform, which is intended to develop suitable curricula and pedagogic interventions to advance the training of postgraduate students in the rapidly developing cross-discipline of e-science.

The DST has also approved a proposal by a Western Cape consortia of institutions, led by the University of Cape Town, to establish a Western Cape Data Intensive Research Facility (DIRF), as part of the NICIS. The consortium includes the University of the Western Cape, the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, Stellenbosch University, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) South Africa project and the new Sol Plaatjie University in the Northern Cape.

This consortium will establish and operate a data-centric high-performance computing facility for data intensive research focused primarily on the high priority research challenges of astronomy, with particular focus on the SKA project, and bioinformatics and related clinical research.

“This DIRF 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,” says project lead Professor Russ Taylor, who is an 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 two node (regional) of the greater cyberinfrastructure system, which will include national infrastructure (tier one), regional infrastructure (tier two) and institutional infrastructure (tier three). All three tiers are proposed to be integrated to develop national capacity for the management of big data in major scientific projects.