The South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO) has released today a new MeerKAT telescope image of the centre of our Galaxy, showing radio emission from the region with unprecedented clarity and depth. The international team behind the work is publishing the initial science highlights from this image in The Astrophysical Journal. The article is accompanied by a public release of the data to … Read More
In an issue packed with retrospectives and news from UWC’s 60th Anniversary year in 2020, IDIA’s language project with the UWC Xhosa department to translate Astronomy resources into isiXhosa get an honourable mention. We also congratulate our Senior research Prof. Mario Santos for his NRF A-rating, a great achievement. Finally, there is also mention of our colleagues from Bioinformatics, and … Read More
Classification of radio galaxies is looking at their shape, their morphology. Studying the shapes of galaxies in one thing we use to learn more about the formation and evolution of those great megacities of hundreds of billions stars, black holes and other cosmic beasts. Radio galaxies are galaxies that have very interesting features that are visible in radio wavelengths. Those … Read More
A hackathon is a fun, fast-paced, strenuous, yet highly rewarding event where developers/coders, designers, strategists, and enthusiasts come together to work on project ideas and build solutions. Hackathons are known for late-night coding in groups, with shared pizzas and screens – but not in these times of pandemic. This time, we do it remotely. This hackathon is co-hosted by the University … Read More
An initiative by Dr. Ryan Daniels at the Forensic DNA laboratory in the Department of Biotechnology at the University of the Western Cape, this month-long workshop takes the participants from the basics of using Unix, the most common computer platform for science, to characterising ancestry with DNA data using cloud computing platforms and software containerisation. The diversity of topics of … Read More
The IDIA Pipelines team is pleased to announce V1.1 of the IDIA Pipeline. The package uses CASA/MPICASA to do the initial cross-calibration (1GC, a’priori) of MeerKAT data on the ilifu SLURM Cluster. This release implements the concurrent cross-calibration of spectral windows on the ilifu cluster and includes several tweaks to improve performance and stability. This release brings several scientific improvements … Read More
This is the name of a panel discussion organised by the U.S. National Institutes of Health as part of a funding opportunity for open data science platforms. Prof. Russ Taylor, director of IDIA, as well as Prof. Nicky Mulder, head of the computational biology group at UCT and ilifu partner both contributed presentations describing the research cloud infrastructure we have … Read More
The Inter-University Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy (IDIA) invites proposals from researchers at IDIA partner institutions and other South African institutions to conduct MeerKAT Open Time Project research using the Ilifu Cloud Computing Research Facility. Expressions of interest will be reviewed, and successful applicants will be provided a letter of support, which can be included in the associated MeerKAT observing … Read More
Sol Plaatje University hosted the Ilifu Big Data Hackathon from 12 – 13 March 2020. The Ilifu Human Capital Development and Outreach Committee in partnership with SPU’s School of Natural and Applied Sciences aims to promote active usage of ilifu (a big data infrastructure for data-intensive research) through hands-on activities, training and skills development. The aim of the Hackathon is … Read More
The Inter-University Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy (IDIA) recently participated in the Federated Cloud Piloting at Osservatorio Astrofisico di Catania, Italy from 10-11 September 2019. The purpose of the meeting was to launch the pilot demonstration project of a South African – European federated cloud to support collaboration on SKA Pathfinder data intensive large programs between South African and European research teams. This meeting … Read More
