Author: Halyna Hyryavets

The last Friday of September in Bratislava's Stara tržnica belonged to the European night of researchers. Also at the 16th year of this event, visitors had the opportunity to learn more about supercomputers and high-performance computing. Experts from the National Competence Center for High-Performance Computing (HPC) welcomed a number of curious visitors of various age groups to their stand, who were interested in supercomputers and their practical use. The team of the competence center briefly introduced NCC for HPC to the interested parties and, through a demonstration of one of the methods used in HPC, introduced the use of supercomputers in practice.

The motto of the 16th year was Trust science which encourages the audience, and especially young people, to activity and experiential learning. Through experiments and interactive demonstrations, they showed the participants that there are scientific explanations and principles behind all the phenomena around us and events in nature. The aim of the Night of Researchers was to encourage young people and the general public to try simple experiments at home and through them get to know science and the people behind it better.

The Science Festival European Night of Researchers is a project financially supported by the framework program of the European Commission for the support of research, development and innovation - Horizon Europe, in the part - Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions under the number 101060946. The European Night of Researchers originated from the initiative of the European Commission and is organized in parallel in 30 states of Europe. 

More info about the event.

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On November 9-10, 2022 at the Grand Jasná Hotel Jasná , interesting speakers and panel discussions, sharing of practical experience of professionals in the field of information and cyber security, interactive training, club meetings and popular networking await you. Come and share valuable knowledge and experience in the area of development, current regulations and trends in IT security and digital transformation, taking into account the key ways of managing organizations.

Do not miss:

• Inspirational panel discussions and presentations by leading speakers.
• 5 main topics - cloud security, AI and new dimensions of information security, unpredictable incidents or security architecture.
• Original trainings in a fun way.
• 3 club meetings - CISO, Audit and DPO Club.
• Popular networking events, VIP receptions and exclusive meeting opportunities.

Take part in the Qubit Tatry 2022 conference and don't miss a unique opportunity for education, presentation of your company and establishing new partnership and professional relationships on the Slovak and Czech cybersec market.

Register your participation in the event today!

The mission of Qubit Conference is to build a professional community of experts in the cybersecurity industry through networking and partnerships through highly professional educational events characterized by a professional approach and a friendly atmosphere.

Today, supercomputing enables industrial sectors to become more innovative, productive and shift business to a higher level. The advantages of using HPC start with a more precise design of complex work pieces, continue with speeding-up the time-to-market, and conclude with the cost-saving of materials and time savings which could be spent for further R&D.

HPC services are now available to Slovak SMEs and industry at the National competence centre for HPC. Slovak National Supercomputing Centre National Supercomputing Center - NSCC and National competence centre for HPC.

• Lucia Demovičová – National Competence Centre for HPC
• Lukáš Demovič – National Supercomputing Centre
• Michal Číž – Ministry of Investments, Regional Development and Informatization of the Slovak Republic

Currently, the Ministry of Investments, Regional Development and Informatization of SR is realizing a project aimed at the creation of a sustainable ecosystem of high performance computing, which will operate the supercomputer for the Slovak National Supercomputing Centre. The existence of such an ecosystem will benefit Slovakia’s innovation potential and increase cooperation between the public sector, private sector and research and academia.

The National Competence Center for HPC carries out a survey of competences and needs in the field of high-performance computing and the use of HPC+ solutions. Entrepreneurs, public and academic institutions can participate in the nationwide survey.

Survey

The project addresses the development and concrete realization of a set of High-Performance Computing (HPC) based interdisciplinary services and tools to exploit large satellite datasets of public European interest provided by:

• Satellite observation of Earth
• FAIR access to processed datasets
• Value-added services through large data storage capability and high-bandwidth network across Europe

This Webinar aims at presenting the tangible outputs achieved by the Phidias HPC initiative at service of the European HPC and Research community, including main features, concrete impact and prospective advantages for Research & HPC ecosphere, mostly in conjunction with the 4 key pillars of the project:

• Building a prototype for earth scientific data.
• Enabling Open Access to HPC Services.
• Strengthening FAIRisation.
• Creating a framework combining computing, dissemination and archiving resources.

The Webinar will feature representatives of the entire Consortium with the specific goal to provide an exhaustive overview of the main advancements of the three Use Cases impacting the Satellite Data, Marine and Ocean data, Earth Observation research communities and to share the most meaningful and innovative lessons learned.

Agenda will be available soon!

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Registration

The FF4EuroHPC project gives European SMEs the opportunity to use European high-end HPC services to develop innovative products or solutions. The two FF4EuroHPC open calls target high-quality experiments involving innovative, agile SMEs. Each experiment is an end-user-relevant case study demonstrating the use of Cloud-based HPC and the benefits it brings to the value chain from the end-user to the HPC-infrastructure provider.

This webinar will focus on two experiments related to environmental impact, which were both successfully concluded:

MARINE LITTER HUNTER – HPC-Based navigation system for an autonomous marine litter-hunting project

Emanuele Della Volpe, CEO and Aerospace Engineer at Green Tech Solution will introduce the Marine Litter Hunter experiment to the participants. Green Tech Solution (GTS) has automated the collection of marine litter thought real-time identification of floating plastic debris on the sea via unmanned vehicles that send GPS coordinates to an unmanned vessel, through a ground control station, which reaches and collects the plastic waste, without the intervention of operators.

The limited ability to predict the future position of the debris is limiting the efficiency of the entire system as the time and energy consumption of collection increases significantly. The HPC experiment allow us to drive into the next phase the collaboration of the unmanned systems for:

• Marine Litter Recognition
• Marine Litter Path Prediction
• Marine Litter Recovery strategy Optimization

HERCULES – weather forecast for drone operation

Project Hercules will be presented by Jose L. Munoz Gamarra, echnical Director at Aslogic. The HERCULES project develops specific weather forecast models for drones, as due to their size they are much more vulnerable to adverse wind flight conditions. In this project, we have developed an approach independent of ground infrastructures.

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The workshop took place in person in the manor house Mojmírovce in Slovakia and participants had the opportunity to gain a comprehensive theoretical overview and practical experience with quantum Monte Carlo methods and their molecular (Quantum Package and CHAMP codes) and periodic systems (TurboRVB). Lectures and trainings was led by experts who are part of the European Center of Excellence TREX.

The workshop was started with an introductory speech by Ivan Štich, who also introduced the participants to the benefits of using QMC methods. The basics of quantum Monte Carlo methods were explained by prof. C. Filippi from the University of Twente, located in Enschede, the Netherlands, is one of the best public technical universities in the world. Participants during the first two days under the leadership of prof. Filippi and Anthony Scemama from the French National Centre for Scientific Research (Centre national de la recherche scientifique  – CNRS) also completed hands-on training to test their skills in QMC methods.

The third day of the workshop focused on advanced methods of quantum Monte Carlo, which was introduced to the participants by Sandro Sorella from the Italian International School for Advanced Studies (Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati – SISSA). Pod vedením K. Nakano zo SISSA prebiehal ďalší hands-on tréning. Počas posledného dňa sa účastníci venovali pokročilým QMC metódam a aplikáciám a to pod vedením Ivana Šticha z Institute of Physics SAS and Michele Casula of the CNRS. The last hands-on training was led by K. Nakano from SISSA and Ivan Brndiar from the Institute of Physics of the Slovak Academy of Sciences.

Thanks to the QMC workshop, participants gained a general overview of the basics of QMC methods and their adaptation for simulations of molecular and periodic systems. They also had the opportunity to learn more about highly topical topics in molecular, crystalline and low-dimensional systems. The QMC workshop was a great opportunity to try out practical exercises and simulations using QMC using the CHAMP and TurboRVB programs.

The new supercomputer, which will help Slovakia partially reduce its investment debt in the field of HPC (HPC = high performance computing), will be accessible to scientists and researchers from the Slovak Academy of Sciences, all public universities and also Slovak entrepreneurs and public administration institutions. Small and medium-sized enterprises and public administration can also use the free services of the National Competence Center (NCC) for HPC,  consult on the deployment of solutions based on HPC and implement testing and so-called proof-of-concept projects. NCC supports the adoption of HPC tools in the areas of demanding numerical simulations, high-performance data analytics (HPDA), artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

The entire Devana system has a purchase price of approximately EUR 2 million and will be installed - similarly to its predecessor Aurel - on the premises of the Computing Centre of the SAS at Bratislava Patrónka. The solution from Lenovo, which will be delivered by IXPERTA, will contain 2 modules - a CPU part and an accelerated part suitable especially for AI / ML applications. The CPU part will have 140 computing servers with 64 cores and 256 GB of RAM; in the accelerated part there will be 8 computing nodes, each equipped with 4 GPGPU Nvidia A100 cards. The high-speed connection will be provided by 100 Gbps Infiniband and users will also have data storage with a size of 3.8 PB.

The announcement of grant competitions and the management of applications for access to computing resources will be the responsibility of the National Supercomputing Center (NSCC). Public universities and public administration organizations can become members of the NSCC, whose role is to cover and support activities in the field of HPC in Slovakia, and thus participate in building the HPC ecosystem, develop cooperation in individual application areas at the expert level and represent the interests of its users. The Devana supercomputer can thus become a technological platform for the support of innovation and digital transformation in Slovakia with the involvement of the academic, public and private sectors. At the same time, the Slovak HPC ecosystem will prepare for further infrastructure investments from the Recovery and Resilience Plan.

The Operational Programme Integrated Infrastructure (OPII) is funded by the European Regional Development Fund and this project (311071AKF20) was supported under the OPII-2020/7/55-NP call.

The workshop was also attended by representatives of private companies, so it also included a brief introduction to the competence center, the EuroCC project and opportunities for using the HPC approach and services in Slovakia and Europe.

The head of the Czech Competence Center for HPC, Tomáš Karásek, presented interesting examples of successful cooperation with companies, but also academic institutions in this area - you can find many of them HEREAnother important topic was a comprehensive overview of available software tools in this domain. Several open-source and commercial software packages are currently available and in development, and during the workshop we also learned about their strengths and weaknesses.

At the end of this pleasant event, we exchanged experiences and procedures with Czech colleagues in cooperation with the private sector and the management of clients from small and medium-sized enterprises.

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