Content about Africa

What level of connectivity, types of networks, data infrastructures, e-tools, and projects, etc.are currently available for researchers  in Sub-Saharan Africa?  iMentors, a project funded under the European FP-7 scheme, is starting to map this knowledge in a virtual observatory.

City lights, sand dunes, and glaciers –oh my! Take a look at NASA’s eye-catching images of Earth from orbit, including true-color satellite images, Earth science visualizations, and time lapses from the International Space Station.

With the year almost over we look back at the debates, controversies, and achievements in the world of science and computing. Read our countdown of iSGTW’s most popular stories of 2012. 

A new and easy way of accessing a global computing grid and the processing power of tens of thousands of cores are at the fingertips of anyone: researcher, student, or citizen scientist.

Last month, we brought you news about the Square Kilometre Array. Now, we have wind of another ambitious telescope. On 1st July, the Royal Society celebrates the discovery of cosmic rays centenary. One project on show will give new glimpses into the highest-energy universe, processing up to 25 petabytes per year; as much data as CERN manages today, which may require a new worldwide computing grid.

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web, and Gordon Brown, former UK prime minister, discussed their joint vision of a mobile-phone Internet infrastructure for the developing world.

Announcement - Registration open for 2nd ERINA4Africa Workshop

Photo courtesy ERINA4Africa.

The 2nd ERINA4Africa workshop will be held at Kumbali Lodge, Lilongwe, Malawi, 6-7 October 2010 with sponsorship from the European Union under the EU FP7 project ERINA4Africa.
The event will provide participants with the opportunity to discover e-Infrastructures and their applications and to network with those interested in application development.
The second (optional) day of this workshop will feature demonstrations and presentations of potential e-Infrastructure applications.
The detailed programme is available here.
Participation is free of charge but limited to 30 participants. Register Now!
Context
e-Infrastructures enable research environments in which researchers globally collaborate and have shared access to scientific facilities (data, communications, computing and instruments).
The coming of the first fibre cables to East Africa in 2009 presented enhanced opportunities for enhan

Opinion: Africa Grid?

Official ribbon-cutting for “Blue Gene for Africa” last year. This supercomputer is the fastest scientific computer on the African continent, capable of 11.5 teraflops (11.5 trillion floating point operations per second). Image courtesy Center for High-Performance Computing

At the EGEE User Forum in Uppsala, the author, Bruce Becker of the Meraka Institute and coordinator of the South African National Grid, called for making an AfricaGrid a reality. Here he outlines the reasons why now is the opportune time for work on this to be starting in earnest.
For some years now, many have been hinting at an “AfricaGrid.”
In the Mediterranean basin, we have seen many African countries participating directly in EUMedGrid (and more recently EUMedSupport).
In the southern region of Africa, we have seen much activity over the last couple of years that allows to envisage at least a “Sub-Saharan Grid.”
This prospect is very appealing to the r

Announcement - IX DOSAR Workshop, 6-8 April

An aerial view of the Kwa Maritane Bush Lodge, where the event will take place.

Registration for the ninth DOSAR Workshop, which takes place 6-8 April 2010 in Pilanesburg, South Africa, is now open.
The Distributed Organization for Scientific and Academic Research (DOSAR) congregates institutions from the southern US, Latin America, and South Africa that are involved in the development of grid computing technology for major high energy physics experiments.
The DOSAR Workshop series is designed as an instrument to improve the relationship among all groups and exchange information about the latest developments in the various analysis centers.
This workshop will be held at the Kwa Maritane Game Lodge, which is in Pilanesburg, two hours drive from Johannesburg, South Africa. The local organizing committee is the University of Johannesburg.
The workshop will cover:

Shared infrastructure
Storage element - design strategy, topology, file syste

Image of the week - Monumental modeling

Despite the monumental nature of the world’s heritage sites, they are quite vulnerable to the vicissitudes of their environment. Wind and water erosion wear them down, destroying historic features we may never be able to recapture.
To understand how the winds are changing the shape of the monuments on the Giza Plateau in Egypt, Ashraf Hussein and Hisham El-Shishiny created a three dimensional model of the region. Then they simulated the flow of the wind across the Giza Plateau to see where the wind pressure and friction is greatest.
This simulation was unusual because it had to handle large differences in scale among the various monuments on the Giza Plateau. To complicate matters, within the lower atmosphere the wind field must be resolved on very fine scales to achieve a high level of accuracy, said El-Shishiny.
To complicate matters, the problem size was much greater than the available computational resources. Ultimately, they ran the simulations on a c

Feature - BOINC gets social with Facebook

A screen shot of Progress Thru Processors.

For the first time, Facebook users are signing on to volunteer grid computing, thanks to a new application called Progress thru Processors.
“For all the promise of volunteer computing, the problem is that no one’s ever heard of it,” said Matt Blumberg, executive director of Grid Republic, “and that’s a big deal for a technology where the utility of the thing is a function of the number of people who participate.”
Progress thru Processors could change all that. The project was developed jointly by Intel, Grid Republic, and the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing. BOINC, which was originally created at University of California at Berkeley to assist in analyzing data in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), is the platform on which Grid Republic’s software is based. Progress thru Processors is an adaptation of Grid Republic’s so