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Back with a Bang

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Background
2020 has marked the start of my journey into e-Logistics and this is perhaps a good time for me to pick up this blog again. My last blog was in 2014 when I was still employed as Research Assistant at the Digital Media Studios at the University of the Western Cape. I had left the Digital Media Studios (DMS) in 2014 for medical reasons. In March this year I met up with my former supervisor. We had a short but fruitful chat. I shared with him my research endeavors especially as it relates to digital technology in Higher Education. I subsequently shared my research article in Research Analytics. I must admit, I am extremely grateful to my exposure so early into computer software and media applications at the DMS.

Where am I now?
Six years on, I am still somehow involved with the University of the Western Cape but this time via the Inter-University Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy (IDIA). IDIA was born out of the partnership of University of the Western Cape (UWC), University of Cape Town (UCT) and North-West University (NWU). 

What is this IDIA you speak of?
These three institutions built this partnership on the building blocks of what is known was the African Research Cloud (ARC). The ARC was created in 2015 when UCT and the NWU worked together to build a research cloud. The ARC is a cloud-based infrastructure hosted by UCT & NWU which lead to the Astronomy Proof of Concept, which was led by researchers from IDIA. The Astronomy POC involved the development of a data intensive calibration and imaging pipeline for radio telescopes, with an emphasis on MeerKAT. The pilot of this initiative is ARCADE.

The ARC tested different models of data management, storage and transfer with the aim of supporting the data processing steps required to transform raw MeerKAT data into scientific data projects. The success of the ARC ultimately led to the large-scale deployment of the pipeline on the IDIA facility, a facility built in anticipation of the deluge of MeerKAT data from different Large Survey Projects.

In September 2015 a formal partnership was agreed upon between UCT, NWU and UWC which lead to the official establishment of IDIA. In February 2016 the University of Pretoria (UP) joined the partnership. It is in that same year that the grant for Ilifu was successfully proposed and accepted by the Data Intensive Research Institute of South Africa (DIRISA) by six partner institutions through its National Integrated Cyberinfrastructure System (NICIS) to build a data-centric computing system that will provide computing power and data storage for projects in the strategic fields of astronomy and bioinformatics. It was at this point that IDIA resources and personnel focused on both Astronomy and Bioinformatics users.

Since 2016 IDIA added additional nodes, and the result became known as the IDIA research cloud. The IDIA cloud, which has served as a test case for the use of cloud technology for collaborative research, is currently used by researchers across seven countries to collaborate on the huge data sets coming off the MeerKAT telescope. It has been acknowledge that the IDIA cloud is, however, not big enough to meet the requirements for the strategic science domains of astronomy and bioinformatics. A further effort to build Ilifu partner institutions and infrastructure was pursued. In December 2017 the Ilifu facility became operational. IDIA research cloud was subsequently integrated into Ilifu in July 2018.

My role in IDIA
As part of the growth of IDIA, a Development and Outreach office was established in May 2017, and today this is where I find myself working as the Administrative officer. My work is both conventionally administrative and also to a certain degree unconventional. The conventional aspect involves financial management, office management and ensuring effecient flow of information. The unconventional part is the web development, scientific communications and digital communications. The unconventional part is truly exciting. My supervisor is a very knowledge person with vast amounts of skills, knowledge and expertise. One could argue she is a leading expert in Development and Outreach.

Final thoughts
In conclusion, it seems to me that my time at DMS has intersected with my time IDIA. I am still very much involved in digital media and occasionally do research. It is a privilege for me to be doing a wide range of things that interest me, and what I thought was unconventional then has now become known as "interdisciplinary".

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