CHPC Initiatives in Data and HPC in South Africa

The centre has recently launched the Data Intensive Research Infrastructure of South Africa (Dirisa).

The infrastructure has a storage facility of two petabytes and is accessible through the South African National Research Network. It operates at a full capacity of 10 Gps/s and provides the latest technology which is based on open source software to enable CHPC users to define their own rules in data acquisition, sharing and curation. The establishment phase was funded by the Department of Science and Technology, following a positive report on the 2007 feasibility study.

The centre has completed the full migration of data portals in Climate Modelling, Astronomy and Earth Observation and is currently migrating data portals in Humanities, medical applications on Rheumatic Heart Disease data and Bioinformatics data on genomic sequencing, amongst others.

Work is underway to drive the identification and curation of other critical research data in order to make it accessible to a wider community. There are also plans to expand the current storage capacity of 2 petabytes to enable sufficient access by the CHPC’s other strategic partners.