Africa-Arabia Regional Operations Centre

Future Gateway - always an appropriate name. FutureGateway is a project to develop an API and related services which will allow web applications to interact with back-end distributed infrastructure of almost any kind. Its design principles are to provide a platform-agnostic bridge between front-end (web) interfaces and back-end interfaces. It adopts the philosophy of using open standards when it comes to implementation choices as far as possible, and thus relies on the SAGA standard - specifically the jSAGA implementation for interacting with grid, cloud and HPC sites. For different cloud stacks, the gateway uses OCCI The reliance on standards means...…

ICRI Fringe Event 2016 Title: Paths to Success for Open Science in Africa Sponsors : Sci-GaIA project (Horizon 2020) UCT e-Research Centre Themes : Open Infrastructures Open Science ICRI 2016 The 3rd International Conference on Research Infrastructures (ICRI) will be held from 3 - 6 October 2016 in Cape Town, South Africa. We are proposing a “fringe event” to the conference, organised by the Sci-GaIA project and UCT e-Research Centre. Participation is entirely open, and will be discussed with the communities involved. See below for more information, and comment on the topic if you’re interested. Context It should be noted...…

Sci-GaIA comes to Dar es Salaam The third Sci-GaIA workshop will be held soon in Dar es Salaam. We’ve got over 100 registrants so far, and a great programme lined up, which means we’re very excited for this event. More Openness In our previous events in Maputo and Dakar, we have had participants talk about the need for Openness, and how this improves research and society. Open Infrastructures, in particular Open Data and Open Science infrastructures underpin much of the advance in research fields, even though they are somewhat invisible to the general public or even research communities. Sci-GaIA is...…

TL;DR : If you use it, support it. Provisioning e-Infrastructure is a thankless job, take it from us. Nobody wants to hear about how you’ve configured your services “just right”, how you’re collaborating behind the scenes, how you’re constantly putting out fires big and small so that research can be done. Usually, folks just skip ahead to the research bit and the researchers get the kudos. This is as it should be. Everybody has their part to play, and we know that the reason that we build and maintain distributed computing services is not for their own sake, but rather...…