Author: Halyna Hyryavets

The supercomputer Leonardo has a performance of approximately 250 PFlop/s, with a total allocation available for Slovak projects being 56,000 GPU node-hours and 25,000 CPU node-hours per year. Therefore, in collaboration with the National Supercomputing Center, the Computing Center of the Slovak Academy of Sciences is opening the first call for proposals to access Leonardo's computing resources.Given the size of the allocation, support will be provided to a smaller number of projects, primarily those that require simultaneous utilization of a large number of computing nodes.

Access is open to all fields of science and research, and eligible applicants are from Slovak public universities or institutions of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. Supported projects should enable progress and innovation in their chosen area, with added value for addressing societal and/or technological challenges in Slovakia.

Applications used in projects should be thoroughly tested, demonstrating high efficiency and scalability on HPC systems or the need for extensive simulations that require a significant amount of CPU/GPU time. These should be highly parallelized applications capable of efficiently utilizing the available resources, the allocation of which would be challenging on the current national HPC infrastructureDevana supercomputer  ). The computational power requirement and resource utilization must be clearly and comprehensively described in the proposal. You can find the specifications of individual Leonardo modules HERE.

The call is open until January 31, 2024. Evaluation and selected projects will be published two weeks after the deadline, and successful applicants will be informed about the next steps via email. Individual projects will be evaluated by the expert staff of VS SAV and NSCC with regard to scientific contribution and the most efficient use of computing capacities. Projects with a maximum duration of 12 months can be submitted through the user portal

Before submitting an application, we ask interested parties to thoroughly familiarize themselves with the conditions of this call..

In case of any questions or uncertainties, please contact us at eurocc@nscc.sk

The agenda included 4 sessions focusing on education and communication, interaction with industry, collaboration, twinning, and mentoring. Participants worked in small groups, discussed specific topics, and exchanged best practices within each topic. Representatives of national competence centres discussed not only collaborations with SMEs and industry, scientific communities, or public administration but also among the competence centres from individual countries.

The communication section focused on promotion and communication channels, especially LinkedIn, and audience building. This section also included a passionate discussion and exchange of opinions and experiences among the NCCs teams.

Members of the working group also had the opportunity to address the issue of education. Participants discussed the most sought-after IT courses they provide and analyzed the shortcomings and problems they face in organizing them. They also delved into a currently very relevant topic: how ChatGPT can be helpful in training.

After successful presentations and discussions, NCC Poland organized a delightful tour of Christmas Krakow for the participants. A big thanks to the organizers for the awesome and productive meetings! Excited for more collaboration ahead!

In addition to being a very productive meeting we also had the opportunity to see the first Slovak supercomputer from 1958. This computer was used for modeling dynamic systems and calculating differential equations, and it was in operation until 1972. We also visited the new Slovak #supercomputer Devana. Devana is a powerful machine that is capable of performing complex calculations at speeds that were unimaginable just a few decades ago.

Follow the project website and social media channels and don't miss out on various interesting educational activities and materials that we are preparing for you

• Superheroes 4 science webpage
• Superheroes 4 science facebook
• Superheroes 4 sicence instagram
• Superheroes 4 science youtube

The dissemination event will bring together EuroHPC Users and will be the occasion for users to attend parallel sessions, learn about different topics and deepen their understanding on the possibilities offered by the EuroHPC JU. In this occasion, users will be invited to present their projects and experience, and the EuroHPC JU will create a book of proceedings with those projects that will submit their manuscripts.

The event will start with a plenary session in which the EuroHPC JU will introduce the EuroHPC systems, the user support and the EuroHPC User Forum. During the second half of the morning, the plenary will continue providing insights on specific domain, including EuroHPC Quantum Technologies, the NCCs and CoEs and the access policy. The Destination Earth project will also present their recent achievements on EuroHPC JU systems. Destination Earth, ktoré sa im podarilo dosiahnuť vďaka využitiu systémov EuroHPC JU.

In the afternoon, there will be several parallel sessions. The first three sessions will be on Computer Science, Computational Physics and Universe Science. These will be followed by three sessions on AI, Engineering and Computational, Chemistry and System Biology. The User Day will conclude with a final plenary session, summarising what was discussed during the day, and providing an overview on future event and activities of the EuroHPC JU.

The dissemination event will be held in person in the Charlemagne building, in Brussels.

The event will be held in English. The morning plenary session will be live streamed. Live stream.

More information

The presentation is divided into two parts. In the first part, we are going to provide an introduction to an exciting research field of eXplainable AI (XAI) and show some interesting applications, including how XAI methods help us to discover hidden flaws hidden inside big black-box models. In the second part, we are going to demonstrate how we utilize Devana in our daily work and how its HPC capabilities help us to boost our research.

Speakers Martin Tamajka – Lead Research engineer ( Kempelen Institute of Intelligent Technologies) and Ján Čegiň – PhD student ( Kempelen Institute of Intelligent Technologies)
Date: 13. December; 16:00 CET
Venue: online via zoom
Registration

A few days before the webinar registered participants will receive an invitation to an online zoom meeting.

About EuroCC Supercomputing Accelerator

EuroCC Supercomputing Accelerator is a free service package to adopt supercomputing for business, research and innovation. EuroCC Supercomputing Accelerator is intended for companies from various areas

Supercomputing technology helps businesses accelerate computing tasks and reduce time-to-market. EuroCC Supercomputing Accelerator is the all-you-need package to adopt supercomputing, step by step, and save more than €116,000 in doing so.

Whether you need to train artificial intelligence, run complex models or want to transform big data into big success, we will help you find the solution you need — through consulting, training and technical support.
podpory.

The call is open for all countries affiliated with EuroCC.
More info about EuroCC Supercomputing Accelerator.

The workshop was held in a hybrid format. As the host organization was NCC Slovakia (with the support of the Austrian NCC), the new Slovak supercomputer Devana was used for hands-on exercises. In addition to the theoretical lecture, during the first day, the participants tried molecular dynamics simulation for a simple membrane protein using GROMACS, including setting up the input files, as well as the simulation itself for energy minimization and data production. The exercise was carried out using an interactive Jupyter notebook. An interesting part was the calculations with the use and comparison of the performance of the application on CPU and GPU computing servers.

The second day of the workshop was devoted to the HADDOCK tool, which is used for integrative modeling of various types of biomolecular systems and their interactions. The HADDOCK3 version is currently available, which offers a modular workflow setup in addition to data-driven docking. The user can choose his own combination of independent modules for his specific case.

Links to the materials can be found on the workshop page HEREWe would like to thank all partners and we believe that the lectures and workshops were beneficial for the participants. We also believe that we will be able to offer similar events in the future thanks to our cooperation with the EuroCC community and centers of excellence.

Most SMB owners are not considered an attractive target for hackers and cyber security threats due to their size. They often believe that the target of cyber attacks are government organizations or large businesses. Hackers do not discriminate according to the size of the company. On the contrary. They consider small and medium-sized enterprises to be very attractive targets mainly due to their vulnerability, relatively weaker security infrastructure, and the fact that they are part of the supply chains of larger enterprises.

Hackers are also using small and medium-sized businesses to improve their hacking practices, with the intention of stealing employee and customer records, bank account information and access to corporate finances, opening the door to bigger fish. This fact is also confirmed by the Accenture Cybercrime study, which reveals that up to 43% of cyber attacks were aimed at small and medium-sized businesses.

Don't become a statistic

According to the World Economic Forum, human error is the leading cause of cybersecurity breaches. Most often, small and medium-sized businesses are attacked via email. According to Cisco, up to 95% of cyber attacks begin with spear-phishing emails that target employees responsible for finance or managing sensitive personal information.

As reported by smallbiztrends.com, last year up to 40% of small businesses reported data loss due to a cyber attack, causing significant operational disruption, financial loss, reputational damage and customer churn due to security and privacy concerns.

More interestingly, the Ponemon Institute found that up to 60% of small and medium-sized businesses do not have an incident response plan in place or a plan to educate employees on cybersecurity, while employees play an important role in maintaining a secure work environment. Small and medium-sized businesses should regularly organize training sessions to educate employees on best practices, such as recognizing phishing emails, how to avoid suspicious links, or how to report potential security incidents.

Get ready for the mandatory Cyber Era

As technology advances, the risk of cyber attacks will continue to grow. Small and medium-sized businesses must prioritize cyber security to protect their customers, employees and financial stability. The European Union is already aware of this, which introduced a new mandatory directive on network and information systems (NIS2) valid from 16.1.2023 also in Slovakia with the aim of creating a framework for increasing cyber security in various sectors based on the amendment and amendment of the Cyber Security Act and of relevant decrees 69/2018 Coll.

     Based on legislative changes, the scope and number of entities that will have to fall under this law will also be defined. This group will include e.g. companies with more than 50 employees and a turnover of more than EUR 10 million. They can already be inspired by the updated decree 264/2023 and prepare for the given obligations. This includes conducting regular risk assessments, identifying vulnerabilities and taking appropriate risk mitigation measures. In addition, businesses must report significant cybersecurity incidents to relevant national authorities.

Get cybersecurity best practices

Qubit Conference® is already bringing a practical all-day training to Košice on November 9 specially tailored for small and medium-sized businesses, it will help you understand the most important cybersecurity requirements in line with the upcoming legislative measures and provide practical guidance for their immediate implementation.

The introduction to the training will go over the legal context for statutory security frameworks and standards, and show why to follow the framework and why not ad-hoc. It will reveal where cyber security begins, clarify the concept of cyber hygiene. Subsequently, he will reveal what you really need to invest in and thus avoid mindlessly spending money on ineffective security solutions, but also how today it is possible to optimize the use of social networks so that you do not leave unwanted traces in the digital space and prevent unwanted hacker attacks on your business. In conclusion, the training will clarify that the incident should not be feared, but should be prepared for in order to minimize losses. You will learn how and why to back up data at all, how to communicate an incident, how to learn from it and where to seek help.

Standard access to high-performance computing resources is open to all areas of science and research, especially for larger-scale projects. These projects should demonstrate excellence in the respective fields and a clear potential to bring innovative solutions to current social and technological challenges. In the application, it is necessary to demonstrate the efficiency and scalability of the proposed calculation strategies and methods in the HPC environment. The necessary data on the performance and parameters of the considered algorithms and applications can be obtained within the Testing Access.

Allocations are awarded for one (1) year with the option to apply for extension, if necessary. Access is free of charge, provided that all requirements defined in the Terms of reference  are met. Submitted projects are evaluated from a technical point of view by the internal team of CC SAS and SK NSCC, and the quality of the scientific and research part is always evaluated by two independent external reviewers.

Call opening date: 6.10.2023
Call closing date: 31.10. 2023, 17:00 CET
Communication of allocation decision: Within 2 weeks of project submission.
Začiatok doby alokácie: najneskôr 16. 11. 2023

Eligible Researchers Scientists and researchers from Slovak public universities and the Slovak Academy of Sciences, as well as from public and state administration organizations and private enterprises registered in the Slovak Republic, can apply for standard access to HPC. Access is provided exclusively for civil and non-commercial open-science research and development. Interested parties from private companies should first contact the National Competence Centre for HPC.

Allocation period: 1 year

Overall allocation offered in the Call: 26 M CPU core-hours and 92k GPU-hours

Available systems: Devana supercomputer  universal CPU and accelerated GPU module

Expected project outcomes:

• Final report within 2 months from the end of the project.
• Peer-review and other publications in domestic and foreign scientific periodicals with acknowledgments in the pre-defined wording, reported through the user portal.
• Active participation in the Slovak HPC conference organized by the coordinator of this call (poster, other contribution).
• Participation in dissemination activities of the coordinator (interview, article in the HPC magazine, etc.).