According to Professor Danie Visser, Deputy Vice-Chancellor with responsibility for research at UCT, research today is fast becoming inconceivable without adequate eResearch infrastructure – information and communication technology (ICT) assets, facilities, skills and services – to support it. “Universities without an equipping strategy may continue to perform, but only for a time. As research changes, all support areas serving research must keep up to stay relevant. Without change, there is a risk that service areas will provide yesterday’s solutions,” he says.

UCT approved the establishment of an eResearch Centre in March 2014. The centre will support and enhance the university’s research capabilities sustainably. A large component of the eResearch strategy at UCT revolves around ICT. Researchers in many fields rely increasingly on ICT as a component of their research, with requirements ranging from support for data management strategies and data-centric architectures to access to specific tools and software for data analysis. Technology is also accelerating the pace and scale of research, with large-scale data requiring a more structured approach to data management and storage. New and more powerful instruments are required: digital recognition of text, speech and imagery, and facilitating crowdsourcing and citizen science.

“We are seeing three major drivers for the ICT change programme, influenced by both global challenges and our own local challenges,” says Sakkie Janse van Rensburg, executive director of Information and Communication Technology Services (ICTS) at UCT. “We want to deliver more, which will require a new organisational structure and roles; we want to deliver the right thing, which means more focus on governance; and we want to deliver it in the right way, which means we need to improve our internal processes to help researchers conduct research faster and more cost-effectively. The concept of eResearch explores the question of how we can, with the latest tools, technologies and approaches, strengthen that research workflow or pipeline of ‘conceive – design – explore – analyse – collaborate – publish – expose’.”

For several years now, ICTS has been delivering eResearch support through the establishment of an HPC (high performance computing) cluster that supports advanced research computing. Janse van Rensburg says that, in 2013 alone, more than 155 researchers across campus were supported, and they submitted more than 270 000 jobs requiring HPC facilities. The computing time for that year added up to more than two million hours.

Professor Taylor, coming from the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Calgary, has a wealth of experience and expertise in radio astronomy, in particular wide-field polarisation, cosmic magnetism and big data, and has played a prominent role in the SKA project since its inception. He was the founding international SKA project scientist and co-authored the first SKA science case. He represented Canada as one of the national members on the SKA Organisation Board. Previously he served as the founding Executive Secretary of the International SKA Steering Committee, the predecessor to the International SKA Science and Engineering Committee.

There is likely a limited window of opportunity to establish national leadership in big data and a global presence in this emerging field.

Professor Taylor’s research covers the cosmic battle between the forces of magnetism and gravity, which is probably responsible for slowing the pace at which the universe uses up its gravitational energy, allowing enough time for life to arise. “My research plan is to use MeerKAT and KAT-7 to measure the polarisation of radio waves and to trace the properties of magnetic fields in galaxies and intergalactic space,” says Taylor. “This will give scientists a better understanding of the evolution of cosmic magnetism.”

Professor Taylor has also served as the Canadian ALMA Software Manager for the Canadian component of the international software development for astronomical use of the Atacama Large Millimetre Array. He was the Canadian co-principal investigator on an international partnership to launch a radio telescope for Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) imaging between Earth and space: the VLBI Space Observatory Programme (VSOP) space mission. As part of the mission, he directed one of three international centres for the processing of the VSOP mission data. He is also principal investigator of the International Galactic Plane Survey, a consortium of more than 60 Canadian and international scientists formed to carry out a co-ordinated data-intensive project of high-resolution imaging of the interstellar medium over the disc of our galaxy. In this capacity, he has also served as the chair of both the management committee for the Canadian component of the project (the Canadian Galactic Plane Survey) and the international project steering committee.

Taylor is chair of an international consortium of 31 scientists from Australia, Canada, the USA, Europe and India that carries out a large-scale spectro-polarimetric all-sky survey project with the Arecibo radio telescope. This project has been granted 2 000 hours of observing time over four years and foreshadows the data volumes that will be generated by MeerKAT.