NEWS

The world's third most powerful and Europe's number one supercomputer is fully operational and accepted as of February 2023. The second pilot phase of the LUMI supercomputer with the GPU partition has been completed. LUMI is now officially ready to fully serve the European as well as the Czech scientific community.

The consortium of EXA4MIND (Extreme Analytics for Mining Data spaces) is pleased to announce the launch of an ambitious project selected and funded by the European Commission as part of the Horizon Europe Programme. Involving top talent from renowned universities and research centres, small and medium-sized enterprises and the industrial sector, 9 partners from 6 countries (the Czech Republic, Germany, Switzerland, Turkey, Spain and France) will join forces to make EXA4MIND a reality and create a unique Extreme Data platform by 2026.

Development is moving forward inexorably, and supercomputers that ruled the TOP 500 ten years ago are now forgotten; many of them are even literally on the scrap heap. New supercomputers are much more powerful and can contain over a hundred cores within a single compute node. When computing certain types of massively parallel tasks, running them can be complicated, leading to the potential of new supercomputers not being fully exploited. The solution is HyperQueue, a tool developed by scientists at IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center for efficient organisation of computations to solve scientific problems.

In 2022, IT4Innovations collaborated with the Police of the Czech Republic on a project to develop models to predict criminality and socio-pathogenic phenomena throughout the Czech Republic. The models will help automate and optimise the planning of patrol activities of the Police of the Czech Republic in the field.  

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In addition to its large supercomputers, IT4Innovations also operates smaller complementary systems. We launched the first of our complementary systems in the Autumn of 2022.

These systems represent emerging, non-traditional, and highly specialized hardware architectures that are not yet common in supercomputing data centres.

Markéta Hrabánková, Ondřej Meca, Tomáš Brzobohatý, Lubomír Říha, Milan Jaroš, and Petr Strakoš impressed on the North American continent and brought the SC22 Best Research Poster Award to the Czech Republic.

After two years of hosting the IT4Innovations Users' Conference virtually due to the pandemic situation, we finally met our users in person. The 6th edition of the conference was held from 3rd to 4th November 2022 at IT4Innovations and was attended by 80 guests.

Meet IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center at The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC22), November 13–18, 2022, at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center in Dallas, USA.

More than half of the Earth's population already lives in urban areas, and they are growing faster than ever before. Researchers at IT4Innovations, in collaboration with the University of Leeds in the UK, have trained a neural network to recognise how cities are changing over the decades, using remote sensing data from the European Space Agency (ESA). The aim of this collaboration is to create useful models that will be available to urban planners. Monitoring urban sprawl will help them to prevent unwanted urban expansion and minimise negative environmental impacts.

In September, the pan-European OpenWebSearch.EU project was launched, bringing together 14 renowned European research and supercomputing centres to create an open European web search infrastructure. The Czech Republic is represented in the project by IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center, which is part of VSB – Technical University of Ostrava.

Our supercomputer center participated again this year in Researchers' Night, our most popular public event. The event, when hundreds of science departments open their doors in the evening, took place on Friday, 30 September, and the theme was With All the Senses. We welcomed record 900 visitors at IT4Innovations. 

The European Joint Undertaking EuroHPC has selected sites to host new European quantum computers. LUMI-Q consortium is among the projects chosen, and its quantum computer will be located in Czechia at the IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Centre in Ostrava.

A dozen programmers from around the world got together in early September to join forces in order to develop software called FIJI. The hackathon, a gathering of developers known in the IT community, was initiated by researchers from IT4Innovations, who have been working on a specialized image processing software package for a long time.

A cheap, effective, and recyclable nanomaterial that can not only detect but also eradicate heavy metals from water, especially cadmium and lead. This is the result of a collaboration between scientists from CATRIN at Palacký University, VSB-TUO and IT4Innovations, and the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2) in Barcelona.

In Prague, the International Conference on Domain Decomposition Methods (DD27) brought together world leaders in the field that combines numerical mathematics with the world of powerful supercomputers. Thanks to domain decomposition algorithms, these computers can be used to solve very large-scale simulation problems in scientific and engineering practice, for example, prediction of aerodynamic properties of aircraft and cars, strength calculations of large-scale engineering and building structures, as well as detailed models predicting climate evolution or simulating various bodily functions.

Ostrava, 15th July – Europe's top research infrastructures have come together in the newly launched BioDT project to jointly design and develop a digital twin prototype for biodiversity research and analysis to support the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030. Scientists from IT4Innovations, the Czech National Supercomputing Center, are also involved in this unique project.

Ostrava, 14th July 2022 – Scientists at IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center are developing a specialised software package that will make the study of proteins easier and faster. The advanced research opens up new possibilities for developing cures for diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

The Czech Presidency of the Council of the European Union began a few days ago, and with it, the first accompanying events related to this prestigious role. One of them is the traditional visit of ambassadors sitting on the Committee of Permanent Representatives of the Member States to the Council of the EU, which is taking place in the Moravian-Silesian Region from 7th to 9th July.

13th June 2022, Kajaani, Finland – The LUMI supercomputer is the first pre-exascale supercomputer of the pan-European EuroHPC Joint Undertaking and is now also the most powerful supercomputer in Europe. Its inauguration ceremony took place on Monday 13th June 2022 in Kajaani, Finland. LUMI offers European researchers a world-class tool for understanding complex phenomena such as climate change and applications of artificial intelligence, while also serving as a platform for international research cooperation. IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center, which is part of VSB – Technical University of Ostrava, is also involved in its construction and operation. Czech scientists thus have access to this unique supercomputer through the services provided by the e-INFRA CZ research infrastructure, of which IT4Innovations is a part.