In the past one year, the SIG on CMMS led by Prof George Amolo of Technical University of Kenya (He is a Physics professor, formerly of University of Eldoret) has been very active. The research IT services team, led by Dr. Moses Thiga  at KENET has supported the SIG in many ways. One of the major outcomes of the SIG on CMMS group was a successful submission of a KSh 100 million infrastructure grant proposal  to NRF in November 2016. The grant proposal was for setting a national HPC center at KENET.

If funded, this will be the first High Performance Computer Center that will be open to ALL users in our community (Physics, Engineering, Bioinformatics, Computational Biology/Chemistry, Pharmacy etc).  ILRI hosts another regional HPC center that is used mainly by researchers in the Agricultural and Livestock research area. Some Kenyan researchers have also had access to the Cape Town High Performance Computer Center on a limited basis.

The SIG on CMMS held a workshop facilitated by KENET on July 6-7, 2017 at MMUST, Kakamega and developed about four research proposals in different areas in readiness for NRF Call for Proposals in 2017 (e.g., Materials Science for Energy Conversion and Computational Chemistry). See group photo below with Prof. Amolo (TUK), Dr. Manyali (MMUST and Host) and Dr. Moses Thiga and Ronald Osure (KENET research infrastructures). Notice the gender imbalance in this area of research!