Africa Research Cloud agreement

With an increase in demand to meet big data requirements, UCT and North-West University have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to support researchers via the Africa Research Cloud (ARC).

Big data projects such as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) and the MeerKAT (being built in South Africa as a precursor to the SKA) have placed extra pressure on ICT resources to meet demands in managing big data.

The ARC combines distributed data storage, computing resources, other cyber infrastructure and skills development into a networked research and development platform for data intensive radio astronomy by all partners.

This MoU commits UCT and North-West University to co-operating and providing the necessary resources for the design, build, maintenance and support of the ARC, which is based on Openstack and Ubuntu.

North-West University IT director Boeta Pretorius (left) and Sakkie Janse van Rensburg, executive director for ICT at UCT at the signing of an MoU on the Africa Research Cloud. Image supplied.