NEWS

Users of IT4Innovations' computing systems gathered for the 7th Users' Conference on 30 and 31 October 2023 in Ostrava. The conference drew nearly ninety participants from various corners of the Czech Republic, upholding its reputation as a traditional meeting point for researchers and scientists who rely on Ostrava's supercomputers. The first supercomputer was put into operation at IT4Innovations ten years ago, and this conference symbolizes the constant growth, innovation, and scientific progress in the field of computing.

Find the latest news, not only from our Supercomputing Center in Ostrava,
in the IT4Innovations Newsletter 7/2023.

Friday, 6 October, was in the spirit of the mysterious, about which Albert Einstein once said that "it is the source of all true art and science." At IT4Innovations, almost 700 visitors uncovered the secrets of the National Supercomputing Centre and supercomputers as part of the Europe-wide event, Researchers' Night.

In September 2023, the migration to Slurm, a new workload manager and job scheduling system, was successfully completed on IT4Innovations supercomputers. Several significant factors prompted this radical change, bringing several benefits for both our users and their research projects.

In 2023, IT4Innovations started collaborating with four partners on the new European Space Agency AIOPEN project, which aims to offer solutions to environmental problems using artificial intelligence. During the project, two case studies will be carried out to demonstrate the capabilities of the AIOPEN platform, namely deforestation monitoring and urban change detection.

„The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science,“ said Albert Einstein, while he was changing the world from behind his desk. Let's experience this feeling together. Let science reveal its greatest secrets. Explore, discover and enjoy.

Find the latest news, not only from our Supercomputing Center in Ostrava,
in the IT4Innovations Newsletter 6/2023.

In addition to its large supercomputers, IT4Innovations also operates smaller complementary systems. These systems represent emerging, non-traditional or highly specialised hardware architectures that are not yet common in the supercomputing centres. Complementary systems consist of multiple hardware platforms.

Researchers from the VSB-Technical University of Ostrava have participated in a breakthrough discovery regarding the photoluminescent properties of carbon dots (CDs), published in the prestigious journal Small. Scientists from the CEET Nanotechnology Centre and IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center, together with colleagues from the Czech Advanced Technology and Research Institute (CATRIN) at Palacký University, found that after irradiation with light, magnetically active polaron states are formed in carbon dots, which can then be used for light-induced hydrogen peroxide production.

The Review 2022 sums up the most important moments of IT4Innovations. Click here to read or download.

The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (hereinafter EuroHPC JU) is part of the portfolio of implementation tools of the EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation Horizon Europe (2021-2027). Its purpose is to concentrate the investments made by European countries and the European Commission in research, development and innovation of supercomputing technologies, to increase them to the necessary level - compared to other global macro-regions - and to strengthen the capacities and competencies of European research organisations and enterprises to develop state-of-the-art HPC systems for the European research and industrial sector and to increase Europe's international competitiveness on a global scale so that the EU research and industrial sector is not primarily dependent on non-European suppliers of supercomputing technologies.

In June, we announced the 29th round of the Open Access Grant Competition. Applications for computing time on the Karolina, Barbora, DGX-2, and LUMI supercomputers can be submitted by employees of Czech research organisations until 2 August 2023. We will announce the results in September.

Find the latest news, not only from our Supercomputing Center in Ostrava,
in the IT4Innovations Newsletter 5/2023.

The most significant science popularisation event in the Czech Republic, the Science Fair, has already passed. This year's seventh edition, traditionally held at the PVO EXPO Praha exhibition centre in Letňany in Prague (8th - 10th June), broke not only records in the number of visitors. Indeed, we couldn't miss out on it.

We invite all IT4Innovations users and research and project partners from various organisations, research institutions, and industries to the 7th Users' Conference of IT4Innovations.

The aim of this special call is to enable the widest possible range of researchers from the Czech Republic to test and gain experience with the GPU accelerated part of the LUMI supercomputer.

The call period and the evaluation of applications will be in an accelerated mode and only in terms of technical readiness, so that testing and benchmarking of the GPU part can start as early as 21 July 2023.

Cell segmentation and tracking are essential for applications in various fields of science and industry. The development and objective evaluation of algorithms for segmenting and tracking cells in time-lapse images from optical microscopes have been the focus of the Cell Tracking Challenge since 2013. The initiative involves research teams from America, Australia, and Europe, including IT4Innovations. The latest collaborative research results of the initiative have been published in the prestigious Nature Methods journal.

In January this year, the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) launched ten centres of excellence that will improve existing computing codes over the next four years to exploit the potential of exascale supercomputers. One of them is the SPACE (Scalable Parallel Astrophysical Codes for Exascale) Centre of Excellence, which will involve scientists from IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center. The SPACE project aims to redesign selected codes to fully utilise new computing architectures and use new programming methods, software solutions, and HPC libraries.

Europe's biggest supercomputing conference, ISC 2023, took place in Hamburg. IT4Innovations was one of the exhibitors and presented the Ostrava Supercomputing Centre and its activities at its stand.

Find the latest news, not only from our Supercomputing Center in Ostrava,
in the IT4Innovations Newsletter 4/2023.