Establishing an Open Science Grid site at the University of the Witwatersrand,
Johannesburg, South Africa
The University of the Witwatersrand (“Wits”) in Johannesburg is one of the foremost
research institutions in Africa, and enjoys a world-class reputation in many fields of
science and technology. Throughout its history, it has also championed the principle that
education should be available to all, particularly so during the many years during which
higher education was largely accessible to only a small minority of the people of South
Africa. Since the establishment of democracy in 1994, South Africa has experienced a
period of unprecedented economic growth and regeneration, with far-reaching influence
across much of sub-Saharan Africa. South African universities such as Wits are
contributing to the reconstruction and development of the country, and the region as a
whole, through research and the production of skilled, critical and adaptable graduates.
Our plan to establish an Open Science Grid (OSG) site at Wits will further promote the
integration of South African science into the global arena, will enable advances in
numerous computation-intensive research fields at the university, and will provide a
platform for an innovative program of training and outreach activities involving local
students and teachers.
Columbia University has collaborated with the University of the Witwatersrand’s
Schonland Nuclear Research Center in recent years in a highly successful science
outreach program targeting high school students in underprivileged communities in and
around Johannesburg. This program also involved major participation by the Wits
Department of Physics, the Wits School of Education, and the provincial Education
Department. We will build on this successful collaboration by establishing a Gridenabled computing cluster at the university, led by the Department of Physics, with
support from other departments, as well as participation by the School of Education in
outreach activities to local schools.
With support from OSG, we plan on establishing an initial, small computing cluster at
Wits in early 2007. This will largely be driven by the nuclear physics group at the
university, led by Dr. Simon Connell, with technical expertise and guidance being
provided by Dr. Sergio Ballestrero. OSG funds should allow a few nodes to be installed
on the cluster in its initial configuration, and there are very good prospects for additional
funding from Wits that would allow an increase in the number of nodes by a factor of two
to three. The nuclear physics group is collaborating with the Computer Science
department at Wits, which has agreed to house and help maintain the cluster, and with the
BioInformatics group, which will provide some support infrastructure. It is anticipated
that the initial facility could be operational some two months after the arrival of cluster
hardware. OSG funds will be used to support a fraction of a cluster administrator, who
will help operate the facility, and who will play a key role in the subsequent integration
into the Grid.
The Wits group has already established good contacts with the heavy ion physics group at
the University of Cape Town (UCT), which has operated its own Grid-enabled cluster in
the context of the CERN ALICE experiment for the past several years. The two groups
are developing ideas for future collaboration, involving the sharing of Grid
experts/expertise, outreach to other regional universities, and likely in the organization of
joint Grid Schools for South African students and computer scientists.
Initial applications foreseen for the Wits site include:
 Grid computing projects performed jointly with the UCT ALICE group
 Analysis, using ROOT-based codes, of data from experiments at Jefferson Lab in
which Wits participates
 GEANT-based simulations for a number of research groups:
o Small Sample Facility for Muon Spin Rotation Studies at RAL ISIS
o Simulations for a Mineral PET project for identifying diamond in kimerblite as an
ore sorting project
o Simulation of the Accelerator Mass Spectrometry detector at the nearby iThembaGauteng laboratory
o Simulation of the the Afrodite Gamma Detector Array at iThemba-South near
Cape Town
 Development of a fast PET algorithm for the Mineral PET project
 Development of outreach programs, with the Wits School of Education, to involve
local schools in high performance computing
We are exploring a number of ideas for education, outreach and training activities. We
hope to be able to invite one or two South African scientists to participate in an upcoming
U.S. Grid Computing Summer School. These scientists would subsequently help
establish and run a Grid School, to be held in South Africa, but open to scientists from
around the region. It is expected that students from Wits will be able to gain experience
with hardware/middleware on the local Grid site, and that they will help develop
applications to be run on the cluster. We are also working with colleagues at the Wits
School of Education to develop conceptually simple, but computationally intensive,
problems that could be used to introduce high school students and teachers to aspects of
cluster/Grid computing.