BY CAREL ALBERTS

Please give a big hand…

Recognition is due to the Department of Science and Technology (DST) for the vision it has shown in funding the National Cyber Infrastructure (NCI) initiative. An ambitious undertaking comprising four broad programmes (see below), the NCI is aimed at providing nationally-accessible high-performance computing – for purposes of establishing a globally competitive research and development (R&D) competency in the country.

Professor Colin Wright, acting manager of the NCI initiative, says it comprises four primary pillars, together constituting a national ICT ecosystem that will allow the country to tackle R&D problems of and on a scale not until now possible:

• The CHPC in Rosebank, Cape Town – established in 2007, it forms the heart of the NCI initiative (situated at the top of our pyramid in the graphic).

• The South African National Research Network (SANReN) – a high-speed, dedicated national network in the making, SANReN will ultimately inter-link research universities (including smaller regional supercomputing nodes, for example at the CSIR’s Tshwane office) and initiatives like the proposed South African Square Kilometre Array site. In the above-mentioned graphic, SANReN provides the connectivity hops between the CHPC, universities and other sites of scientific or research importance around the country.*

• The SA Grid initiative, employing clustering and software-as-a-service principles to stitch the country’s top-end computing resources together and remotely provision applications. The grid is depicted with the use of triangles in the graphic; and

• The proposed Very Large Data Sets initiative, which reaches beyond questions of bytes for bucks into issues of proper storage standards, for integration and analysis. “The stupendous amounts of data produced every day as a matter of course ought to remain available, or subsequent generations will be the poorer, as we are the poorer for the loss of ability to interpret historic data,” says Wright.

Sources: http://www.chpc.ac.za/,

http://www.meraka.org.za/sanren.htm

Concrete initiatives – CHPC

Of these four, the CHPC is the most mature undertaking, about to enter Phase 2 at the time of writing (its third supercomputer, details undisclosed). Tackling so-called grand challenges staring the country (and international clients) in the face, the CHPC’s establishment and running is the responsibility of the CSIR’s Meraka Institute.

CHPC has several very interesting projects on the go, notes Wright. It has already completed its programmatic support of the following three research projects within SA universities, and will support their future efforts only on an ad hoc basis:

• UCT’s climatological and oceanographic project to model weather patterns and ocean currents;

• The University of Limpopo’s computer and material sciences project researching and developing new battery types; and
• The University of the North West’s space radiation research programme.

Currently CHPC is still funding (that is, providing computing cycles and user support to) the following universities and projects:

• UCT’s AIDS-related programme, started in March 2008;
• The University of Stellenbosch’s antenna development project for the SKA project;
• University of KZN’s quantum computing project;
• The CSIR’s DPSS Institute’s fluid dynamics project, contributing in-house developed CFD software to Airbus’s development of next-generation aircraft;
• A collaboration between UCT, UKZN and University of the Western Cape on an astronomy venture; and
• A (now delayed) project contributing to the CERN particle accelerator programme.

Proposals awaited

At the time of writing, proposals were being invited for the next round of projects. “While these are headline projects, it doesn’t mean we don’t invite smaller ones,” says Dr Happy Sithole, CHPC director. “In fact, we have up to 170 small academic projects using our computing infrastructure.”

In addition, CHPC welcomes commercial and industry use of its facility. Currently setting aside 30% of capacity for such use (not subsidised), Sithole says the centre (and no doubt the DST and taxpayer) would like to see more companies making use of CHPC’s breathtaking power, to improve their own innovativeness.

SANReN

Among the rest of NCI’s components, SANReN is the closest to fruition. CSIR’s Meraka is likewise responsible for its implementation and management.

SANReN’s first phase was regional, inter-linking four sites (Wits University, the University of Joburg, the CSIR’s Pretoria campus and Telkom’s Hartebeesthoek Satellite Earth Station) in a metro fibre ring that clears data at a rate of 10 Gbps. It went live in March 2008, under the stewardship of Neotel.

The contract for SANReN’s national component was awarded to Telkom in July 2009. In parallel, the Johannesburg network will be replicated in Pretoria, Cape Town and Durban – and later on, in ‘second-tier’ urban centres such as PE, East London and Bloemfontein. All will be linked via a 10 Gbps national fibre optic backbone network.

If CHPC’s goal is to provide accessible supercomputing capabilities to the research community, SANReN’s is to provide the link to remotely provision that power.

“SANReN’s objective is to allow scientists around the country to engage in meaningful online collaboration or networked research, and to link them to international bandwidth,” explains Geoff Daniell, project consultant, SANReN project.

More than that, SANReN is part of a bigger picture, the above-mentioned ICT ecosystem contained within the NCI. Kagiso Chikane, Centre manager for the Meraka Institute, sums it up neatly: “SANReN will give institutions access to … the CHPC, enable a national computing grid and allow for large volumes of data transfer among institutions – typically a requirement of the research community. Of immediate relevance is its importance in supporting South Africa’s Square Kilometre Array [SKA] bid to host the world’s most powerful radio telescope.”

SANReN factoids

For the SANRen network, Meraka specified dedicated (unstructured, unmanaged) bandwidth, accessed via next-generation Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) interfaces. While no network management was required, Telkom maintains the service by way of normal fault reporting procedures.

A once-off upfront payment in the region of R350 million over three years was made for the infrastructure, which supports both 1Gbps and 10Gbps services for a 10-year term. The fee included installation charges. The DST grant specified that no recurring costs were to be incurred, among other tough public finance management criteria.

As a government agency, the CSIR prefers using a spread of providers, as is evident in its use of Neotel on a regional basis and Telkom for the national portion. The international link is funded by Tertiary Education Network (Tenet – a Section 21 company), and uses Seacom. Once the Department of Public Enterprise mooted West African international cable is a reality, it will present another opportunity to acquire international link capacity and redundancy.

Initially endowed with 10Gbps, the SKA installation will require at least 100Gbps of bandwidth to deal with the data it plucks from the Karoo skies.

SANReN requires major cognitive and attitudinal adjustments from its recipients and providers. Whereas universities accepted bandwidth limitations before, now they need not concern themselves too much anymore. The sudden deluge of bandwidth befalling them will also mean having to re-think the way research centres are networked and protected, inside and out.

Lastly, affordability had to be addressed. Globally, the average cost of bandwidth is in the region of $4 per Megabit per second per month. In South Africa, it is still many thousands of rands. Only Seacom’s pledge and a similar one by Infraco’s mooted cable can significantly alter that landscape.

Game-changer

All in all, the CHPC, SANReN, and the planned grid and data storage initiatives add up to a significant wind change for the local academic community. Developing nations seldom get involved in networked research, since capacity (notably communications infrastructure) is costly. (For instance, the earth imaging project that the CSIR is now undertaking as a result of SANReN requires downloading 10 Gigabytes of data from NASA daily.)

When SANReN is in place, complete with its international portions, local research will finally be able to engage in data transfer of extremely high orders of magnitude. Naturally, this will inspire greater scientific and other innovative enterprise, while also positioning South Africa as a serious destination for pan-African research and development.

Conditions have never been more favourable. The influence of the African Union is intensifying, specifically its preference for intra-African trade (‘indigenisation’ or ‘local content’). As a result, more and more African research projects are ending up in South Africa.

“African scientists have tended to take their problems to North America, and then stay there,” says Prof Wright. “Lately, more of that requirement has washed up on our shores, which allows us greater opportunity to support and promote Africa, and to use African resources to solve African problems.

The people – enemies of the people

At the ANC’s Polokwane conference this year its ‘Zanufication’ became flagrant for the first time – you could see and hear the change in tone, and if you could get close enough, it would jump up and spit in your face. Like Robert Mugabe’s Zanu PF, the ANC has found a potent weapon in harnessing its members’ thuggery and endorsing it with cynical silence. Since then it has become an ever more openly held ‘policy’.

It is obvious to many people that the ANC is among the biggest threats to South Africa’s constitutional democracy (though not the biggest). To many within its own ranks – as well as the entire rest of the country – the party has become a liability and an embarrassment.

And yet some appear to delight in its sociopathic behaviour; there is no other conclusion. While nobody will admit as much, a poll on the weekend shows that 74% of decided voters will vote the ANC back into power next year. If this is true, with all that we know about the ANC’s criminality, arrogance, incompetence and racism, I’d say the real enemy of the people and democracy is not the ANC. The ANC is but an expression of the hatred still fermenting in the hearts of those who suffered under apartheid. It answers a need in the market.

A Metro FM DJ referred last week to the debate among ordinary black people – should the transition to majority rule in 1994 have been as peaceful as it was? Should there not have been war? It was a shocking thing to hear, but it is by no means an unthinkable preoccupation of a once oppressed people.

We may as well confront the real issue: Peace is far from guaranteed if the ANC can incite violence among its followers, and its followers are not only susceptible to it, but reward a rogue party with re-election.

Whether Bob Dylan knows this or not (he doesn’t seem to really want to know about these things), his early years of brilliance are still an inspiration. Even just hearing someone else sing one of his songs can cause an emotional episode.

I was sitting next to my wife in Walk the Line, listening to Joaquin Phoenix doing Johnny Cash doing Dylan’s It Ain’t Me, Babe, and it made me cry. I remember being wound up tighter than a tampon. The song softened me up good.

I wasn’t embarrassed at all; in fact I got quite into it. Crying does you good; you forget that. My wife was embarrassed, of course. I had my face buried in her shoulder but I was sending shudders through our row of seats, crying big, noisy man sobs. I wasn’t holding back. I figured the noise of the song was drowning me out, and I thought everyone would be too enthralled to notice me in the glare from the screen, but my wife noticed. There was no explaining Dylan and his effect on me to her, or my sudden realisation that he would die one day and that I would have to deal with it and be dealt with when this happened.

Anyway, here I am three years later, watching No Direction Home. I’m alone and I have my notebook. This time I aim to tell someone something about the Dylan effect on susceptible people. I don’t want it to be a serious review; it’s going to be more like some margin scrawls in the life-long story of Bob Dylan, a kind of library graffiti.

• I can’t connect the querulous-looking older guy being interviewed in the film with the halo-haired, frail-looking, explosive singer that came out of nowhere and conquered New York and the world. Here are some of the many words that occurred to me during the movie that can be used to describe him: improbable, strange, authentic, sweet, perplexing, himself, utterly, utterly right. More of those later on.
• As regards perplexing: People like my ex-wife don’t, have never and in all probability never will understand the very first thing about Bob Dylan, namely ‘why Bob Dylan’? Why listen to a man with a voice like a broken reed in a gale, when there’re sweet voices like, say, Shayne Ward? Why get so bent out of shape about the life of a guy who so obviously thrived on being misunderstood, probably out of a fear of being understood and ripped off? Why? The closest my ex ever came to engaging me on the subject of BD was to listen to ‘Just like a Woman’, quietly and politely, only to ask at the end why he’d found it necessary to say a woman is just like a woman. Another time she laughed at one of his drawn-out, out-of-time deliveries. While the first question is answered easily enough (sometimes a woman is like herself, at others like a little girl), the second isn’t. Maybe the thing to say is that the rules don’t always apply where Dylan is concerned.
• Those closest to Dylan didn’t get him either. John Cohen (great photographer of that era) appeared in interviews in the film. He recalls that, in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Dylan asked him to sing with him. The song was ‘You’re gonna miss me when I’m gone’. Cohen sang, but thought, ‘hang on, there isn’t going to be anyone left to miss us! What is this?!’. He meant for it to be funny, supposedly, but I can’t help feeling he was really making a judgment. The problem that many other signers with a ‘social conscience’ had with Dylan was that he always refused to be called a political singer, a protest singer. It’s a limiting classification, I think he felt (I agree), not to mention a repulsive one. He was capable of far more, and he sang what he felt like. He got the whole protest thing better than anyone, certainly enough to write and sing protest songs, but really, he was just a singer. An artist. Does my writing this piece make me a reviewer? No. I don’t give a shit about Westlife, and nobody can make me write anything about them. It’s not really possible to fully show the hateful little attitude behind Cohen’s comment, the limiting and limited outlook squirming beneath it, until he talks again later: Another singer (the girl from Peter, Paul and Mary), had come back from Florida to icy New York after her first big break. Cohen asked why she didn’t have a tan, and she explained her manager had told her to stay indoors to fit in with the biblical theme he was creating for the group in a time of serious folk mania (another band member changed his name at the manager’s suggestion). Cohen’s skin ‘crawled’. ‘She had the chance to go to Florida while I was in New York, and she didn’t go outside,” he said. He was happy to hog the moral high ground, why? Because he was jealous, the poor fool.
• Naïve, obstinate, passenger, player, vulnerable all the same… (Dylan, not Cohen).
• Dylan: “God, I hate it when they boo. All that booing. I can’t get in tune when they do that. You can’t hear anything. I don’t even know if I want to get in tune.”
• Dylan: “They said they would kill me? Do they do that a lot? I don’t mind getting shot, I just don’t want to be told about it, you know?”
• Liam Clancy: “He was Charlie Chaplin, Dylan Thomas. He was a Shapeshifter. It wasn’t necessary for him to be a definitive person. He was a receiver. He was possessed.”
• Paul Rudd (I Could Never be Your Woman, with Michelle Pfeiffer): “I don’t have to be a real man. I’m an actor.
• Me again: I think I have calculated how long it takes for genius to become mainstream. Forty years.
• From http://www.amazon.com/Bootleg-Vol-Dylan-Albert-Concert/dp/B00000D9TO: Live 1966: The “Royal Albert Hall” Concert has surfaced on two discs mixed and mastered from three-track source tapes that put the myriad pirated recordings to shame. More important, Live 1966 documents a momentous artistic showdown between a wilful, inflamed, and utterly fearless performer and his headstrong core following. The Dylan of the mid ’60s had made the leap from socially conscious voice of his generation to surrealistic electric poet, a transformation that was met with contempt by a vocal element of his audience. The most telling moment of the recording centers on the standoff: A folk zealot in the audience shouts, “Judas!” earning cheers from the contentious crowd. Dylan responds by snarling, “I don’t believe you. You’re a liar,” then turns to his group, the Hawks (soon to become the Band), and, as the intro to “Like a Rolling Stone” takes shape, commands, “Play loud!”
• I remember other such gems that make you laugh and feel sad, alternately.
• But why call his life unprecedented? Wasn’t Mozart a rock star? Sure, he didn’t play the electric guitar.
• Sometimes he was just fucking with everyone. Or not, you couldn’t tell. (“Awlll ah reely wanna dohooooo, is baby be friends with you…”)
• He looks and sounds uncannily like Cate Blanchett in I’m not Here.
• He called himself an ‘expeditionary’ (experimental) singer, who had to immerse himself in different kinds of music. He stole hundreds of records from people who took him in. Joan Baez stole a song from him, but like you would steal a lock of someone’s hair. He was lucky to have her; she loved him. And while she took him on stage when he looked like a ragamuffin and she was famous already, he wouldn’t share the stage with anyone when he became famous.
• Baez: “When he was light and happy, it was spectacular. When he was dark I would have to deal with him. I was already doing that (being his motherly girlfriend).”
• Baez: “One night he’d play it in waltz time, the next in 2-4, just to fuck you up.”
• Dylan: “You can’t be wise and in love.”
• Me: He let them guess their way through all the wrong questions.

Journalist: “Do you have anything special to express when you sign?”

Dylan: “No.”

Other journalist: “Why do you sing, then?”

Dylan: “Because I feel like it.”

J: “Don’t you think your first albums were better?”

D: “Who said that?”

J: “That fella.”

D: “Are you American?”

J: “No, I’m French.”

D: “That explains it.”

J: “Do your songs have a message?”

D: “Where did you hear that?”

J: “I read it somewhere.”

J: “Do you think you should be the leader of all singers with a message?”

D: “No. I don’t know what that means.”

• He’s the boy you love who won’t stand still for you to dress him nicely.
• He writes, sings and speaks well.

Carel Alberts

No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (2005)

I’d been depressed for a month. I might have been feeling that way for a long time and not known it, I don’t know; accepted it as the lot of someone who works because he has to, not because it allows him to say something with his life. Day in, day out, two years into my own business and still trying to be a businessman, but still sucking at figuring out why it is that I’m working constantly and earning good money and yet never actually have any, and never see the light of day for lack of time, or anyone to share the day or the office or a cup of coffee with.

All this, I thought, would pass. I’m a pretty hard worker and self-tinkerer, tinkering, tinkering at my chinks until this task, too, is easy in the end, and this, and this, and I’m better for it. I was working on two tax consultants at once: one was on my 2007 return and in the middle of filing season when she had a stroke. Nobody could talk to her to find out what she’d been busy with or at what stage things were. I had sent my tax invoices to her in the post – someone had signed for it, but nobody knew who. I pored over the PostNet slip with its uptight little female or teenage signature, worked out the surname wrong and phoned everyone by that name in and around the neighbourhood in this remote town where this obscure tax consultancy operated, a company that a friend (now dead) had said was “good, maybe too good, but for that reason probably a safe bet”.

With all this happening to me, I’d fallen more than a year behind filing deadline by the middle of this year. It was time to start working on the next (2008) return, so I got another tax consultant, this time local. I figured I was in trouble – I probably owed the revenue service a whack of money, and through a weirdness of my self-unemployed tax status, I owed all of it now. Meanwhile the business papers were taking an interest in a billionaire businessman who was being hounded by the tax commissioner. I was starting to feel physically sick with worry and lack-of-closure-overload. But I was working on things – one way or another (either paying the tax man much less than I thought or landing in jail), soon all this would be behind me and I could move on to current things.

Suddenly, it was behind me. I didn’t owe nearly as much as I’d thought, but nothing changed. I couldn’t sleep. I woke up in the mornings feeling like death, even though I’d quit smoking and drinking months before. I went to bed depressed, wondering what disfiguring antisocial programming I was planting in my kids’ brains without knowing it (everyone else is doing it), what fears they already harboured that I hadn’t resolved in my own life. What kind of a son and grandson I’d been; what a complete bastard, my entire life, to every girl who’d ever given me affection. Normal stuff, if you don’t block shit out.

Then, one day, as I put the finishing touches to an article I’d written, painstakingly perfecting it, I realised where all this unhappiness-turning-to-delusion was coming from. I had written something that was way more than it ought to have been, if not a work of art then at least a thing of modestly beautiful craft, and it was going to end up in the sponsored section of an IT trade rag as a laptop feature. That’s what the hell the matter was. All my life was like this. It was meaningless. Anyone would have hated it; dutifully, doggedly, doing their best for – what?

So I decided to change my life, and the first thing I did after that was to look for a self-publishing space on the Web. Hence Everymag. It’s where I come to be myself after work. Next thing I did, even before I wrote this article, I wrote an entry called ‘No direction home’. But that’s for next time.

Meanwhile to all the other poor working stiffs out there, here’s my advice: work even harder. But make it something you want to do. And don’t quit the day job.

Next instalment: No direction home