Sol Plaatje University hosted the Ilifu Big Data Hackathon from 12 – 13 March 2020.
The Ilifu Human Capital Development and Outreach Committee in partnership with SPU’s School of Natural and Applied Sciences aims to promote active usage of ilifu (a big data infrastructure for data-intensive research) through hands-on activities, training and skills development.
The aim of the Hackathon is to broaden access to big data research cloud infrastructure through the development of skills and knowledge in working efficiently on extremely large datasets.
SPU is a member of a consortium of the Ilifu cloud computing project for data-intensive research. The objective of the Ilifu project is to address the need for data-intensive research support in South Africa.
The Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy (IDIA) considers it one of its key mandates to contribute to skills development in big data science across Africa. The event aims at South African researchers to be global pioneers in the strategic science domains of astronomy and bioinformatics, and simultaneously promote human capital development in these sectors.
During these two days, SPU BSc Honours students were taken through a demo of Ilifu and participated using the Ilifu Research Cloud to develop and run their big data projects.
The participants were also provided an opportunity to learn about the various careers available to them in the science industry.
