NICS is proud to announce the addition of three new staff members who will be providing additional support to the national cyberinfrastucture system of South Africa. They are Nyameko Lisa and Eugene de Beste for the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) and Nhlamulo Chauke for the Data Intensive Research Initiative of South Africa (DIRISA).
A little more about them
Nyameko Lisa

Nyameko Lisa joined the CHPC on 1 June 2020 as a High Performance Computing Scientist with CHPC within NICIS. He will be part of the ACE Lab. He holds an undergraduate BSc degree specializing in Physics, Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, a Master’s Degree in Physics where he studied and modeled nuclear particle reactions and a Postgraduate qualification in Intellectual Property Law. Nyameko is currently pursuing his Doctorate in Physics.Nyameko is not new to the CSIR as prior to this, he was a Senior Researcher at the National Laser Center. Prior to joining the CSIR, he was a Software Practitioner for the Simulation and Design Group at Denel Dynamics. This was preceded by his time at Koeberg Nuclear Power Station where as a trainee nuclear physicist.
Eugene de Beste

Eugene is a young and passionate technology enthusiast who has a history with high-performance and cloud technologies and joins the CHPC as a Senior Technologist. His academic background includes receiving a BSc in Computer Science (Cum Laude) at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), followed by a BSc Hons in Information Technology (First Honours) at the University of Cape Town (UCT), and finally an MSc in Bioinforamtics (Cum Laude) at the South African National Bioinformatics Institute (SANBI) through UWC.
During his undergraduate years he was involved in the CHPC’s Student Cluster Competition as part of the team that got the overall winning position at ISC’14. During and after his MSc he worked at SANBI automating systems, doing general Linux based systems administration, revamping networking, introducing DevOps concepts and designing and implementing a distributed storage (Ceph) and cloud (OpenStack) solution. The development of the aforementioned systems led to his co-developing and implementing the ILIFU Cloud based at UCT, where he was responsible for parts of the OpenStack and Ceph deployment. He has also consulted external companies as a SANBI employee to teach and assist with OpenStack deployment and assisted in the deployment of a prototype eResearch compute cluster at UWC.
Nhlamulo Chauke

Nhlamulo Chauke joined the CSIR on 1 June 2020 as a Software Developer for DIRISA. He holds a BSc degree in Computer Science and Statistics from the University of Limpopo and is currently studying towards an Honours degree in Statistics with UNISA. He has experience in several programming and scripting languages, and skills in tools for building microservices for robotics. His interests include Data Science and Big Data ecosystems.
Nhlamulo is not new to the CSIR. Upon completion of his Bachelor’s qualification, he joined the CSIR as an intern with the then MDS unit in 2015. He was promoted to a Software Engineer in 2017, and his role included developing software that runs on robots and assembling robots. In 2019, he left the CSIR to join Rand Merchant Bank on a project on migrating their existing architecture (Monolith applications) into a microservices architecture.