South Africa

In this session, Otshepeg Mabuse, a senior cloud engineer at South Africa's Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC), describes the country's approach to sovereign digital infrastructure through parallel investment in cloud platforms and in the people who build and operate them. She situates CHPC within the National Integrated Cyber Infrastructure (NICI), whose three pillars are SANReN for networking, a data services provider, and CHPC for compute, serving researchers across South Africa, the SADC region, and Square Kilometre Array partners. CHPC's Lengau supercomputer previously appeared on the Top 500, and a four-petaflop system is planned. Mabuse explains a growing convergence between traditional HPC and cloud, with researchers simply seeking the right compute for their workloads rather than choosing HPC versus cloud. Her work develops sovereign cloud capabilities using open-source technologies including OpenStack, Ceph, Ansible, and Bifrost for bare-metal provisioning. She argues that sovereignty extends beyond data residency to encompass control over data, infrastructure, and, most importantly, the skills to operate that infrastructure. Noting that South Africa has many cloud consumers but few organizations building cloud infrastructure locally, she stresses that technology and hardware are available; the real constraint is developing and retaining skilled people. She highlights the Student Cluster Competition as a flagship human-capital development program, noting that she herself began as a competition participant before joining CHPC.