In a first for Africa, the University of Cape Town (UCT) and North-West University (NWU) have established a cloud-based data centre. The move is a step towards setting up the African Research Cloud (ARC) for data-intensive research. The data centre was established through the Inter-University Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy (Idia), a partnership between UCT, NWU, the University of Pretoria and the University of the Western Cape (UWC). Idia was formed specifically to deal with the big-data challenges that will arise from the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope, UCT said in its announcement of the initiative. But it will not be confined to SKA, as one of its stated goals is to provide a platform for big-data research in other sciences.
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