PRESS RELEASES

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 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.

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.

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.

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. 

Hamburg, 30th May 2022 – Its name is LUMI and is installed in Kajaani, Finland. Only a third of it is operational, but even this, with a peak performance of 151.9 PFlop/s, has earned it third place in the ranking of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, and even gold in Europe. We are talking about the long-awaited European supercomputer star - the LUMI supercomputer. It offers part of its computational resources to the scientific community in the Czech Republic thanks to the membership of IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center, which is part of VSB - Technical University of Ostrava, in the consortium building this supercomputer.

Ostrava, 13th April 2022 – Data room of IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center at VSB – Technical University of Ostrava boasts not only supercomputers but also high-capacity data storage facilities. The first one is the PROJECT storage, which significantly facilitates the work of researchers who calculate their projects on the Ostrava supercomputers. In the second case, it is the data storage facility of the CESNET association, which is one of the largest in the Czech Republic.

The first pan-European study programme focused purely on High- Performance Computing (HPC) is being established in Europe. IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center, which is part of VSB - Technical University of Ostrava, is also a member of the consortium that will offer its courses to students from autumn 2022. Future students will find excellent career opportunities in rapidly expanding fields such as HPC, High-Performance Data Analysis (HPDA), and Artificial Intelligence.

Ostrava, 15th November 2021 – The 58th edition of the TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers was announced today in St. Louis, USA.  Karolina, the most powerful Czech supercomputer, located at IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center, was ranked 8th worldwide and 3rd among European supercomputers in terms of the most energy-efficient supercomputers in the world.

Until now, observing subatomic structures was beyond the resolution capabilities of direct imaging methods, and this seemed unlikely to change. Czech scientists, however, have presented a method with which they became the first in the world to observe an inhomogeneous electron charge distribution around a halogen atom, thus confirming the existence of a phenomenon that had been theoretically predicted but never directly observed. Comparable to the first observation of a black hole, the breakthrough will facilitate understanding of interactions between individual atoms or molecules as well as of chemical reactions, and it opens a path to refinement of the material and structural properties of various physical, biological, and chemical systems. The breakthrough was published in Science.

The e-INFRA CZ consortium has achieved the highest possible score in the international evaluation of large research infrastructures in the Czech Republic, which took place under the auspices of the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic. The consortium consists of three independent infrastructures: CESNET, IT4Innovations and CERIT-SC. The evaluation highlighted, among other things, the progress made in merging these infrastructures and the resulting benefit of a unified access to services for users.

Karolina, the latest Czech supercomputer, located at IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center in Ostrava, has reached the 15th place in the Green500 list, which evaluates the most energy-efficient supercomputers in the world.

The e-INFRA CZ consortium has implemented quantum key distribution, which has reached primacy in many ways. Communication secured by encryption through quantum key distribution (QKD) represents a new shift in the field of communication security and addresses the risks associated with the advent of quantum computers, which brings with it the real danger of existing encryption methods being cracked more easily. This is the first national as well as international inter-city distribution of quantum keys in the Czech Republic, specifically to Cieszyn, Poland. The implementation of the distribution is the result of cooperation between CESNET and IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center at VSB - Technical University of Ostrava and the Polish PSNC academic network. 

There is no doubt that artificial intelligence is becoming part of everyday life. Newly, it could also help in life-threatening events. Czech scientists, including those from IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center, are developing a voicebot that should be activated when emergency lines are extremely overloaded.

IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center has joined the LIGATE project, which will use European supercomputing systems to improve computer-aided drug design. Ostrava's supercomputers will thus contribute their computing power, in rapid response to the global pandemic crisis.

The Karolina supercomputer located at IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center has ranked 69th in the TOP500 list of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. With its two computing parts, Karolina has scored twice in the TOP500 list, namely 69th and 149th. In Europe it ranked 19th and in the Czech Republic it confirmed its dominant position as the most powerful Czech supercomputer.

In March, a large-scale vaccination centre in Ostrava's Černá louka area became operational. Vaccination according to a simulation prepared by scientists at IT4Innovations can be administered to up to 2,600 people per day. Today's capacity is around 1,000 people, depending on the number of vaccines being delivered.