Content about Africa

How do scientists use supercomputers to predict complex things like weather, climate, earthquakes, and the formation of galaxies? Watch this video to see how supercomputers handle mathematical modeling.

On 30 August, 220 computer servers from CERN will start a journey to the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), in Ghana, Africa. This will provide a new computing center for KNUST and enable African students to participate  in simulations of LHC data.

Avatars, grids and mobile phones are helping bridge the gap between illiterate deaf people and literate hearing people in Tunisia.

Announcement - e-Science Talk is coming to ERIN4Africa, Helsinki, 9-10 December Due to the success of e-Concertation in Geneva this month, e-Science Talk has been invited to become a media partner at the 2010 Euro-Africa Week on ICT Research and e-Infrastructures, to be held in Helsinki, Finland on 7-10  December 7-10, 2010.  We will be blogging live on GridCast from this four-day conference, which is  supported by the European Commission, the African Union Commission and the Finnish government’s ministries for foreign affairs, employment and economy. The agenda is: •    7-8, Dec, 2010 — “3rd Euro-Africa Cooperation Forum on ICT Research” •    9-10, Dec, 2010 — “2010 Euro-Africa e-Infrastructures Conference”  •    10, Dec, 2010 — Lab Visits Registration is free of charge, but pre-registration is required. Registration forms are available at the following l

Announcement - Workshop on discovery physics at the LHC, Kruger National Park, South Africa

South Africa’s oldest national park is famous for its large populations of the “Big Five” large mammals — 1,500 lion, 12,000 elephant, 2,500 buffalo, 1,000 leopards and 5,000 rhino. Image courtesy Kruger National Park

The early registration deadline is 31 August for Kruger 2010: Workshop on Discovery Physics at the LHC, to be held at the Protea Hotel Kruger Gate, Kruger National Park, Mpumalanga, South Africa.
The workshop itself will be held 5-10 December, where it will include discussions on the latest Monte Carlo tools, cross-section calculations for signal and background processes to higher orders, as well as strategies for new physics searches are expected.
The status of the CERN Large Hadron Collider,along with first measurements from the LHCexperiments, will also be presented.
Amidst the surroundings of one of the worldʼs largest national parks, the physi

Announcement - Third AlmereGrid Desktop Grid workshop 29-30 March

On 29-30 March 2010 a major desktop grid event will take place in Almere, The Netherlands. The event combines:

3rd AlmereGrid Grid Experience workshop; the scientific part of this workshop concentrates on desktop grid applications for eScience and eBusiness.
The part Citizen support for eScience will have as the major part of the EDGeS@Home launch announcement event, and several other desktop grid presentations.
The Dutch Gridform.nl society annual meeting.
A tutorial on desktop grid computing is also planned.

You can register for the whole event or only for the part that is of interest to you on the event website.
The event is organized by AlmereGrid and Gridforum.nl with support from EDGeS and Almere City marketing.

Announcement - Applications due for grid application porting school

The South African National Grid is the primary sponsor for The School for Grid Application Porting. Image courtesy of SAGrid.

The School for Grid Application Porting is now accepting applications from students with experience in shell programming.
The event, which is sponsored by the South African National Grid, EGEE II, and GILDA, will take place 15-26 March 2010 in Johannesburg. It will be hosted by University of Johannesburg and University of Witwatersrand.
In scientific research, collaboration, resource sharing, advanced computing facilities and data are enabling the acceleration of discovery, innovation, and efficiency more than ever. The grid computing paradigm is a crucial aspect of today's e-Science, and national infrastructures have been deployed worldwide, with a strong emphasis on usability, interoperability and collaboration. However, development and support of the user communities is just as crucial as tha

Feature: MANGO-NET - Helping to bring African ICT up to speed

Mangoes are cultivated in African countries such as Nigeria, MANGO-NET aims to cultivate an ICT infrastructure. Image courtesy Amr Safey, stock.xchng 

While computing technology is ubiquitous and increasingly powerful, its availability in developing nations remains limited. African universities struggle to participate in cutting-edge research because they do not have access to a widespread computer infrastructure, so their ability to conduct experiments and share results is compromised. As more science becomes “e-science,” the problem gets worse.
To help solve this, MANGO-NET (Made in Africa NGO NETwork), was launched. This project seeks to boost information and computing technology (ICT) throughout Africa, by establishing a network of schools and production labs to train ICT students to build their own computers. Because components are bought in bulk, it should reduce hardware costs, decreasing African depe

Feature - SAGrid: A view from the coordinator’s chair

SEACOM is a 1.28Tbps, 15,000 kilometer-long undersea fiber-optic cable system that will provide high-speed communication between East Africa, South Asia and Europe. As of press time, its promoters expect the system to be up and running in less than three weeks. Image courtesy SEACOM

Bruce Becker of the Meraka Institute in Pretoria is the Coordinator for planning the upcoming South Africa Grid initiative — which will draw upon the resources of South Africa’s Center for High Performance Computing and the country’s high-speed network, SANREN. Here, he gives an update of the status of the project.After over a year of training sessions and technical workshops in multiple countries, preparations are under way for a move to full production readiness of the South Africa Grid, or SAGrid.The testing and incubation phase is coming to an end; the high-speed national research network SANREN is under way and already ac

Feature - Rough waters: fighting modern-day pirates with technology

Map of reported pirate incidents in the Gulf of Aden, off the coast of Somalia. (Click for large, high-resolution version.) Image above courtesy of UNOSAT; image on front page courtesy of sxc.hu

In the past year, maritime shipping has suffered a resurgence of piracy, at a level that the world has not seen since the early 18th century. Sailors working off the Horn of Africa have been particularly hard hit: last year, records show that 125 ships were attacked and 45 seized.
Real numbers are likely much higher, as piracy is believed to be widely under-reported. One of the world's busiest shipping lanes, about 20,000 ships annually pass through the Gulf of Aden on their way to and from the Suez Canal — carrying a tenth of world trade.
Unlike the popular image of pirates seen in movies and books, modern pirates are more likely to wield machine guns than muskets; and the crime remains as difficult to fight as it ever