Andrew Lewis attended the CHPC National Meeting and 5th BELIEF Symposium in Sandton on behalf of Sakkie van Rensburg. BELIEF (Bringing European eLectronic e-Infrastructures to Expanding Frontiers) is an EU FP7 project supporting the goals of e-Infrastructure projects. Its objective is to coordinate the efficient & effective communication of results, networking and knowledge between e-Infrastructure projects and their users to promote worldwide development and exploitation. The symposium was attended by over 250 delegates from South Africa and other countries. This year's theme was “Advancing Research and Development through the National Cyberinfrastructure Initiatives”.
The CHPC put forward a proposal for a national Very Large Data Base (VLDB) which was workshopped by delegates from academic and research institutes country wide. Other sessions included a discussion on SANReN's history, progress and future, Supercomputing for weather and climate modelling, parallel computing, development of EGEE into the sustainable EGI model as well as ICT support for HPC and grid.