The University of Cape Town (UCT) has highlighted the tenth anniversary of the country’s Inter-University Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy (IDIA). This is a joint endeavour between UCT, the University of the Western Cape and the University of Pretoria and is hosted by UCT.

The IDIA was created to meet the problem of processing, analysing, interpreting and visualising the huge amounts of data that would be produced by the next generation of radio telescope arrays. South Africa’s own world-leading MeerKAT, which became fully operational in 2018, is the most notable of these. And now the South Africa-based mid-radio frequency array of the international Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope will soon also start operations.

“IDIA represents the kind of environment in which scientific and technological excellence reinforce one another,” pointed out UCT Vice Chancellor Professor Mosa Moshabela. “The scientific ambition of MeerKAT and the [SKA] demand new technical capability; in turn, those technical advances open new questions for science. That cycle – between advancing discovery, technology and human expertise – is where universities can make a distinctive, long-lasting contribution.”

The IDIA’s third funding cycle has also been initiated, covering the period 2026 to 2030. The institute has been a great success. Its technologies and support have contributed to at least 25% of MeerKAT-related scientific publications, worldwide. It has also supported research in other scientific disciplines, such as bioinformatics. This has strengthened interdisciplinary collaboration and strengthened UCT’s place as a leading African hub for data-intensive science. Further, over the past decade, it has supported more than 500 graduate students across a range of scientific disciplines.

“The first decade has shown that the decisive capability is not simply high-performance computing,” reported IDIA director Professor Roger Deane. “It is the research ecosystem around that hardware – the workflows, software, technical expertise, visualisation tools, training and partnerships that allow scientists to carry out world-leading research with MeerKAT right now, which best equips our community for the SKA Observatory era.”

IDIA operates South Africa’s ilifu research cloud, which is a nation-wide distributed computing platform, for astronomy and other sciences. To date, more than 640 users, based at more than 140 institutions around the world, have registered on ilifu. More than 50% of these users are based at South African institutions.

Also based at UCT, the IDIA Visualisation Laboratory (better known as the VizLab) had contributed to the development of tools used globally to analyse complex multidimensional datasets from major international observatories. These tools included the Cube Analysis and Rendering Tool for Astronomy (better known as CARTA) and the immersive Data Visualisation Interactive Explorer (better known as iDaVIE).