South Africa Grid: A view from the coordinator’s chair
When you look at the Real Time Monitor, you see incoming and completed jobs shuttling in rapid fire between computer centers scattered all over the globe — including Antarctica.
What you do not see are any jobs traveling to and from southern Africa. To remedy this will be the South Africa Grid, or SAGrid.
After over a year of training sessions and technical workshops in multiple countries, preparations are under way for a move to full production readiness of the SAGrid, writes its Coordinator, Bruce Becker.
The testing and incubation phase is coming to an end; the high-speed national research network SANREN is under way and already active at several sites; and the international bandwidth available to South African universities will increase dramatically when the SEACOM fiber optic cable up the African East Coast comes online. At the same time, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research’s Computing Center has also recently undergone a major upgrade, more than doubling the computing capacity at that site.
Source: Bruce Becker for iSGTW. More about SAGrid can be found at its website. See also the first edition of the BELIEF Zero-In Magazine, Blue Gene for Africa.
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