The South African Population Research Infrastructure Network (SAPRIN) is a prominent institution within South Africa dedicated to enhancing and disseminating high-quality population-based research. SAPRIN’s central goal is to provide insights into the country's demographic, health, and social structures and trends, thereby aiding evidence-based decision-making. To bolster its research...
Biodiversity seems to be under threat from a variety of sources. Traditionally urbanisation and agricultural expansion have claimed most of the land. More recently climate change has held the limelight. But poaching, particularly of plants, is an issue that has become dire within the last few years. Technology has changed the way field-research is undertaken, providing localities more...
DIPLOMICS (DIstributed PLatform in OMICS) is a research infrastructure established by the Department of Science and Innovation through its South African Research Infrastructure Roadmap (SARIR). “OMICS”, the study of a collection of biological molecules, e.g. genomics, proteomics and metabolomics, often involves high-throughput, large-scale data generation. Our objectives are to enable and...
The increasing adoption of cloud technologies in research cyber-infrastructures, including commercial clouds (Azure, GCP, AWS), research-oriented clouds (CHPC’s Sebowa cloud and Ilifu cloud facility), and private cloud environments, has enabled greater flexibility and scalability in the industry and academia.. We present the use of Kubernetes and Cloud resources in the ongoing African Pathogen...
The ALICE experiment at CERN is one of the four big detectors on the LHC.
ALICE's main focus is the Pb on Pb collisions, which have just been completed at the end of October 2023. We shall describe how computing works. How the data is processed for Run 3 coming off the detector, how it eventually gets analysed, and the part that CHPC plays in this computing. We shall also describe the...
While plant genome analysis is gaining speed worldwide, few plant genomes have been sequenced and analyzed on the African continent. Yet, this information holds the potential to transform diverse industries: it unlocks medicinally and industrially relevant biosynthesis pathways for bioprospecting and can boost innovation of plant breeding and plant protection strategies. Considering that South...
The depletion of fossil fuels and rapid growth in world population are the main drivers of research interests to find alternative renewable energy sources that could alleviate the global energy crisis. Hence, perovskite solar cells have been largely explored as a prospective source of clean and renewable energy. They have shown remarkable progress with rapid increases in power conversion...
The South African Weather Service (SAWS) has employed the computing resources of the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) for several research projects. The current project is primarily focused on model development, utilizing the Conformal Cubic Atmospheric Model (CCAM) provided by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). The model was successfully...
This research presents DFT and TD-DFT calculations for eight 1,2,4-triazole compounds (A1-A8) that were theoretically evaluated as organic dyes in dye sensitized solar cells (DSSCs). The parameters used in this evaluation included, oscillator strengths, electron diffusion constants, electron injection efficiencies, electron collection efficiencies, highest occupied molecular orbitals (HOMO),...
Effective use of high performance computing resources in computational chemistry and materials science
Krishna K Govender1,2*
1Computational Chemistry and Molecular Modelling Group, Department of Chemical Sciences, University of Johannesburg, PO Box 17011, Doornfontein, 2028, Johannesburg, South Africa
2National Institute for Theoretical and Computational Sciences (NITheCS), South...
Our modern industrialised societies are critically dependent on a variety of metals from iron and steel through to technology materials like silicon, copper, and aluminium. The vast majority of these commodities are sourced from metallurgical smelting furnaces of various designs, in which primary or secondary raw materials are converted into the molten state at very high temperatures in order...
Research Software Engineers (RSEs) support researchers in generating efficient, correct and reproducible research, and in promoting the development of sustainable (and re-usable) software for research. This talk will introduce the concept of Research Software Engineering (RSE) Groups as an emergent outcome of the decade-long history of the RSE movement that originated in the UK; highlighting...
The Agrometeorology division of the Agricultural Research Council represents a research group focused on weather and climate in relation to agricultural activities. One aspect of the group’s activities is to investigate how climate change could impact agricultural activities, focusing on smallholder to large-scale commercial farming activities. To understand the future effects of climate...
We present an overview of some of our recent DFT studies of bulk solid-state systems, of Iron, metal-oxide and alloys, as well as two-dimensional silicene. In particular, we show the applications of x-ray absorption near-edge spectroscopy (XANES) to elucidate the physical and chemical properties of these materials. We show the possibility to induce novel-magnetic properties in silicene through...
Description: This is the review article on using computational modelling to accelerate the drug development process for viral infections based on African indigenous medicinal plant species.
Background: Natural products or related drugs such as botanicals or herbal medicines make up approximately 35% of the annual global market, followed by 25% from plants, 13% from microorganisms and 3%...
ABSTRACT
The study evaluates the performance of the Conformal-Cubic Atmospheric Model (CCAM) when simulating an urban heat island (UHI) over the City of eThekwini, located along the southeast coast of South Africa. The CCAM model is applied at a grid length of 1 km on the panel with eThekwini, in a stretched grid mode. The CCAM is coupled to the urban climate model (UCM) called the Australian...
Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has proven to be a powerful tool for elucidating flow features in a range of disease cases. The technique can be used in combination with other approaches to capture key features of a specific disease. In this talk, we consider two disease cases that have benefitted from high performance computing (HPC). The first case, Coarctation of the Aorta (CoA), is a...
High-performance computing (HPC) is an increasingly influential field with the potential to transform various industries, with nanomedicine being one of the key beneficiaries. Nanomedicine is the integration of nanotechnology into medical practices, encompassing the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of diseases. Among the various nanoparticles used in this field, lipid-based nanocarriers...
Pyrometallurgical furnaces are integral for extracting valuable metals from ores, operating at temperatures exceeding 1600◦C. These furnaces represent complex multiphase systems, posing significant challenges for direct industrial-scale study.
Multiphysics models provide critical insights into these complex behaviors, assisting furnace designers and operators in making informed decisions...
Projection of Droughts in Africa within different extents of global warming as performed on The CHPC’s Lengau Cluster
African temperatures are projected to rise rapidly under low mitigation climate change futures, at 1.5 to 2 times the global rate of temperature increase. This high regional climate sensitivity in combination with the relatively low adaptive capacity implies that the global...
The CHPC Users Forum Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) aims to bring all users of CHPC resources together with the following aims:
- Sharing information on the usage of CHPC compute resources over the past 12 months;
- Announcing anticipated updates to infrastructure and services;
- Providing an opportunity for users to meet and engage with CHPC personnel;
- Discuss topics and questions from the...
Description:
The WHPC Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) session for 2023 will be a unique platform for participants to actively establish teamwork, get to know each other better through fun outdoor activities like never before. Participants will have a chance to team-up with others in a quest to “change the landscape of HPC” in South Africa.
As such, we are delighted to invite conference...
INTRODUCTION
Human African trypanosomiasis (HAT) is a neglected tropical disease (NTD) caused by two subspecies of the parasite, namely Trypanosoma brucei (Tb) gambiense (g-HAT) and rhodesiense (r-HAT). HAT, which can be fatal when left untreated, is endemic in sub-Saharan countries where the tsetse fly vector breeds, affecting an estimated 70 million people.
Both g-HAT and r-HAT are...
