Sponsors

Thinkst Canary Platinum

Thinkst is the company behind the Thinkst Canary, a software (and hardware) product built in South Africa, servicing the world.

Our Canaries are deployed on networks on all 7 continents and are pretty widely loved. Our people have been at the forefront of both offensive and defensive cyber security research for almost 2 decades and have presented research (or keynoted) at most of the reputable conferences world wide.


Python Software Foundation Gold

The mission of the Python Software Foundation is to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers.

The majority of the PSF's work is focused on empowering and supporting people within the Python community. The PSF has active grant programs that support sprints, conferences, meet ups, user groups, and Python development efforts all over the world. In addition, the PSF underwrites and runs PyCon US, the primary Python community conference.

Being part of the PSF means being part of the Python community. Recently we changed the PSF to an open membership organization, so that everyone who uses and supports Python can join. To learn more, visit https://www.python.org/psf/membership.


SARAO Gold

About the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO)

The South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO), a facility of the National Research Foundation, is responsible for managing all radio astronomy initiatives and facilities in South Africa, including the MeerKAT Radio Telescope in the Karoo, and the Geodesy and VLBI activities at the HartRAO facility. SARAO also coordinates the African Very Long Baseline Interferometry Network (AVN) for the eight SKA partner countries in Africa, as well as South Africa’s contribution to the infrastructure and engineering planning for the Square Kilometre Array Radio Telescope.

To maximise the return on South Africa’s investment in radio astronomy, SARAO is managing programmes to create capacity in radio astronomy science and engineering research, and the technical capacity required to support site operations. The scale of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) represents a huge leap forward in both engineering and research & development towards building and delivering a radio telescope, and will deliver a correspondingly transformational increase in science capability when operational.

Deploying thousands of radio telescopes, in three unique configurations, it will enable astronomers to monitor the sky in unprecedented detail and survey the entire sky thousands of times faster than any system currently in existence.

The SKA telescope will be co-located in Africa and in Australia. It will have an unprecedented scope in observations, exceeding the image resolution quality of the Hubble Space Telescope by a factor of 50 times, whilst also having the ability to image huge areas of sky in parallel. With a range of other large telescopes in the optical and infrared being built and launched into space over the coming decades, the SKA will perfectly augment, complement and lead the way in scientific discovery.

South Africa has already demonstrated its excellent science and engineering skills by designing and building the MeerKAT telescope – as a pathfinder to the SKA. The first seven dishes, KAT-7, are complete and have already produced its first pictures. MeerKAT is attracting great interest internationally – more than 500 international astronomers and 58 from Africa submitted proposals to do science with MeerKAT once it is complete.

The technology being developed for MeerKAT is cutting-edge and the project is creating a large group of young scientists and engineers with world-class expertise in the technologies which will be crucial in the next 10 – 20 years, such as very fast computing, very fast data transport, large networks of sensors, software radios and imaging algorithms.

Construction of the SKA telescopes

Construction of the SKA telescopes will take eight years (including 18 months contingency), having begun in July 2021 following approval by the SKAO Council. The telescopes will be delivered in phases, within an ambitious timeline as detailed in the table below.

The first major milestone, known as Array Assembly 0.5, is due to be reached in early 2024 with the completion of six SKA-Low stations and four SKA-Mid dishes. A further four Array Assembly milestones will see construction progress rapidly on both sites, with the completion of Array Assembly 4 - two full arrays - expected around 2028.

The commissioning process, which tests that components work together as a system, will take place as we progress through each Array Assembly stage. Science verification will also begin while the telescopes are still under construction, carrying out end-to-end tests of the system based on proposals for astronomical observations from the SKAO user community.

Commissioning and science verification ensure that the telescopes meet users' needs; carrying them out as each Array Assembly is constructed means any required adjustments can be made as early as possible in the process, minimising the risks as much as possible.

Following the completion of Array Assembly 4, expected in 2027 for both telescopes, a final Operations Readiness Review will take place. The formal end of construction is scheduled for July 2029.


AWS Silver

Since launching in 2006, Amazon Web Services has been providing world-leading cloud technologies that help any organization and any individual build solutions to transform industries, communities, and lives for the better

As part of Amazon, we strive to be Earth’s most customer-centric company. We work backwards from our customers’ problems to provide them with cloud infrastructure that meets their needs, so they can reinvent continuously and push through barriers of what people thought was possible.

Whether they are entrepreneurs launching new businesses, established companies reinventing themselves, non-profits working to advance their missions, or governments and cities seeking to serve their citizens more effectively—our customers trust AWS with their livelihoods, their goals, their ideas, and their data.


City of Cape Town Silver

Cape Town, or the Mother City, is South Africa’s oldest city, its second-most populous and the legislative capital. It is made up of a diverse population, a rich history, world-famous tourist attractions and an exciting calendar of international and local events. More than 231 councillors and 26 225 staff serve 4 million residents across a sprawling and cosmopolitan metro of 2 500 square kilometres.

The City provides all the services normally associated with a full-service municipality, such as water, electricity, waste removal, sanitation, new infrastructure, roads, public spaces, facilities, housing developments, the upgrade of informal settlements and existing infrastructure, clinics and more.

To meet the current and future needs of its residents, the City of Cape Town has formulated strategies and policies to guide development and growth. Central to these is the Integrated Development Plan (IDP), which is a five-year plan that informs the City’s policy and budget decisions. The City’s strong sense of community makes it one of the best places to live, work and raise a family.


Afrolabs Patron

Afrolabs is a tech lab for positive impact organisations, in Africa.

Founded in Cape Town in 2004, we have gone full remote since 2020.

“love creating” is our credo.

It’s our mission to figure out how we can continue to love creating the sorts of things we love creating. More often, with more sparkles, with more joy, with more colleagues, with more cake.

We continue growing and evolving our anarcho-syndicalistic community of practice, a group of mostly developers working on our portfolio of aligned positive impact initiatives.

Our commercial work on for-profit initiatives at afrolabs runs alongside our work non-profit initiatives at coderlevelup.org, and those two get closer and closer together with time.

In the last 20 years our work has spanned many industries and technologies, but a lot of our work has focused on logistics and media. Our current main projects are:

  • building tech for library for the blind at TapeAids.com
  • building interfaces to telemetry for GoMetro,
  • devdev a professional community for developers,
  • code retreat days of deliberate practice,
  • and of course code club to help young people into coding.

Together we create the world: The world we want to live in, a world to love creating.


Centre for High Performance Computing Patron

The Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) was established in 2007 and is mandated to provide high performance computing resources and domain specific support to both public and private sector users. Located in Rosebank, Cape Town, the CHPC is South Africa’s national super-computing facility hosting the country’s largest HPC cluster. Our user base encompasses researchers, scientists and engineers from South Africa, SADC and the African SKA partner countries. Our resources include a 32 000 core cluster, a 30 GPU cluster, high speed 4 PB storage, and a 320 core cloud system. The CHPC is active in outreach and knowledge sharing, with an annual conference in December and regular workshops, including the summer coding school and winter HPC school.

The CHPC is one of three primary pillars of NICIS, the national cyber-infrastructure intervention supported by the Department of Science and Innovation (DSI), and implemented by the CSIR. The South African National Research Network (SANReN) and the Data Intensive Research Infrastructure of South Africa (DIRISA) complement the CHPC through the provision of high-speed, high-bandwidth connectivity, and the effective curation of a variety of notably large and critical databases, respectively. The CHPC infrastructure is updated and maintained meticulously to comply with international standards.


Black Python Devs Opportunity

Black Python Devs intends to be a dedicated source of support for Black and Colo(u)red Pythonistas and the organizations supporting them around the globe.

Our community focuses on creating a space for Black Pythonistas of all skill levels to connect, learn and share with one another.

We are proud that our participation in PyconZA came in the form of making it easier for developers/individuals to attend the event.

We look forward to continuing our support Python events across Africa and the globe. You can join the mission at https://blackpythondevs.com.



Thinkst Canary
Python Software Foundation SARAO
AWS City of Cape Town
Afrolabs Centre for High Performance Computing
Black Python Devs