Researchers, digital curators and digital librarians embarked upon the South African National Bioinformatics Institute at the University of the Western Cape as part of the Ilifu User Engagement Workshop 2019. The aim of Ilifu is to engage South African researchers at the partner organisations to be global pioneers in the strategic science domains of astronomy and bioinformatics and simultaneously promote human capital development in these sectors.
In addition to establishing and operating a data-intensive computing facility, Ilifu has undertaken research and development programmes for:
- Proto-typing a distributed, federated cloud-based infrastructure as a platform for data-intensive research.
- Data-processing pipelines and eResearch tools for big-data analysis, visualisation and analytics.
- Research data management systems and tools.
- Platforms, portals and middleware to support access and collaborative research by distributed teams on data-intensive projects.
This user engagement workshop follows the Research Data Management Users Engagement workshop held in March 2019 held at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology. The Director of the Ilifu Facility, Associate Prof. Mattia Vaccari, presented on the current status of the ilifu cloud computing facility and spoke about the opportunities to run new Astronomy and Bioinformatics projects on the facility.
The workshop proceeded with presentations, demos and a discussion by the team involved in running the facility to enable our current and prospective to understand the facility requirements and how to better prepare for the submission of new projects as per the Call for Projects released in August 2019. While the topics covered mainly focused on astronomy and bioinformatics and projects, participants were encouraged to submit project proposals for multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional teams.
Deadline for Project Proposals is 01 October 2019.
Images courtesy of Sanjin Muftic (2019)
Images courtesy of Sanjin Muftic (2019)