Africa Innovation Centre Cape Town

A Satellite
We opened our second AIC (Africa Innovation Centre) yesterday (17th September 2009), this time in Cape Town. The opening of this AIC is approximately a year after the opening on the first centre in Johannesburg. The Cape Town AIC is a satellite to the centre in Johannesburg, which operates as our central hub.

I envision an ecosystem of connected AICs that leverage a shared pool of resources (people and technology) across the Sub-Saharan region - delivering innovative solutions and support to our partners and clients.

Smart
I believe that the Innovation Centres offer an ideal facility for building the type of solutions required to realise a vision of a Smarter Planet.

Firstly we use the centres to develop the required skills; secondly we support our clients and partners in building their own solutions; and lastly we are jointly able to prototype and test the latest technologies that spur innovation.

I am looking forward to the launch of the next centre ...


Press coverage
ITNewsAfrica – IBM launches another Africa Innovation Centre

Reuters – IBM Launches New Cape Town Africa Innovation Center to Help Fuel Skills Growth in...

Trading Markets – IBM opens Africa Innovation Center in Cape Town

IT Online – IBM extends Innovation Centre to Cape Town

ITWeb – IBM opens CT innovation centre

South Africa Info – IBM's second Africa innovation centre

ITNewsAfrica: IBM commits to Africa

IBM’s Chief Technology Officer, Clifford Foster, has reiterated his support for business development in Sub-Saharan Africa saying it’s an important market for his company.

Speaking to ITNewsAfrica.com recently, Foster noted that despite the global economic meltdown IBM has shown its commitment to the continent evidenced by its investments across Africa and its recent opening of offices in Nairobi and Lagos.

“ The economic meltdown has impacted on many but for us we have shown resilience through the opening of offices in Nairobi and Lagos, we’ll continue to invest in Africa as a matter of fact we are connected to sub-Saharan Africa,” he said.

The Technology supremo at IBM further explained that his organization has faith in Africa hence the graduate programme which they have established to recruit young professionals and expose them to culture and life at IBM.

“Our graduate programme is meant to show young graduates what it is like to work for IBM,” Foster noted

Upon his appointment in November last year, his stated priorities were to drive innovation through the company’s African Innovation Centre (AIC) and to establish various partnerships with universities across the continent; an initiative he is passionate about.

“My focus for 2009 will be on driving the AIC concept further into Africa. This is not a South African-centric statement; IBM will be tapping into innovation wherever it happens.”

True to his word, the Fortune 500 IT company expanded its operations in Kenya from sales and marketing offices to a fully fledged operation, in order to capture growth in the East African region.

Upon being asked what IBM was doing regarding cyber crime ahead of 2010, Foster, said they were working on a number of projects with the South African government without going into specifics.

“With 2010 coming, we are working on a number of projects, we have technology that can process vast amounts of data in real time. I’ am unable to give you specifics but what I can say is that it can be anything even border controls,” he explained.

IBM has been operating in Africa for nearly six decades and has invested more than $US120 million in the last two years as part of its strategy to focus on the world’s growth markets.

Its investments include a Johannesburg-based Africa Innovation Centre -which has a software solutions lab- cloud computing capability and a banking centre of excellence. Also, IBM has donated a Blue Gene Supercomputer, which is located at Cape Town’s Centre for High Performance Computing, to be used for research by institutions across sub-Saharan Africa.

Original article here

What's in a petaflop?

Peta-what?
This question came up today - what's a petaflop? I had to remind myself as it isn't something I discuss every day.

A petaflop is a thousand trillion flops or floating point operations per second.

IBM's RoadRunner is the world's fast super computer and was designed for a peak processing capability of 1.7 petaflops and a sustained 1 petaflop of processing. It was built at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, USA.

Where to from now though?

IBM and a group of nuclear physicists are planning a 20 petaflop machine (nicknamed Sequoia) for the US Department of Energy computer.

Sequoia will be used for nuclear safety calculations and nuclear explosion simulations. In addition it will be used for climatic modeling and other branches of science that use predictive modeling.

I came across this interesting graph that shows the performance of supercomputers over time, with RoadRunner at the 1 petaflop mark (that's the 1,000,000,000,000,000 data point).


In essence a machine like this enables more simulations to be run in the same amount of time, which increases confidence in the resulting predictions.

Pigeon faster than ADSL in South Africa

I read about this article yesterday and it would be so funny if it wasn't a reflection on the sad state of affairs in our broadband market ... ok it is funny.

This is the story
A staff member of The Unlimited was so frustrated with the speed of their Telkom ADSL connection that he came upon the idea that it would be faster to send the data (to their head office) using a pigeon.

Yesterday they put the theory to the test and sent a four gigabyte package using both options: pigeon and flash-drive vs ADSL. The ADSL download had only completed 4% of the download by the time the pigeon reached their head office (in KZN).

Obviously
This isn't a true reflection of the ADSL connection as there is a limit to how far the pigeon can fly and the further the distance, the better the ADSL download would have performed ... however it is hilarious.

Thank goodness for competition in this market as we have alternatives for backhaul and the "last-mile" (hub to curb). Pity there is only one provider of fixed line though as wireless, WiFi, WiMax etc are always going to be subjected to some degree interference.

On a positive note - consider how far we have come in four years - dial-up and ISDN were the norm when I left for the UK in 2005.