Graduate students and postdoctoral scholars from institutions in Australia, Europe, Japan and the United States are invited to apply for the 13th International High Performance Computing (HPC) Summer School, to be held on 7-12 July, 2024 in Kobe, Japan, hosted by the RIKEN Center for Computational Science. Applications to participate in the summer school will be accepted until 23:59 AOE January 31, 2024.
The summer school is sponsored by the RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS), the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU), the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre (Pawsey) and the ACCESS program. Additional sponsors, who will conduct separate, internal selection processes, include EPCC (U.K.) and NICIS CHPC (South Africa). It is important to note that certain places for the 2024 school are still being offered on a preliminary basis and will be confirmed subject to funding availability.
The summer school will familiarize the best students in computational sciences with major state-of-the-art aspects of HPC and Big Data Analytics for a variety of scientific disciplines, catalyze the formation of networks, provide advanced mentoring, facilitate international exchange and open up further career options.
Leading computational scientists and HPC technologists from partner regions will offer instruction in parallel sessions on a variety of topics such as:
HPC and Big Data challenges in major scientific disciplines
Shared-memory programming
Distributed-memory programming
GPU programming
Performance analysis and optimization on modern CPUs and GPUs
Software engineering
Numerical libraries
Big Data analytics
Deep learning
Scientific visualization
Canadian, European, Japanese, Australian and U.S. HPC-infrastructures
The expense-paid program will benefit scholars from Australia, European, Japanese and U.S. institutions who use advanced computing in their research.
The ideal candidate will have many of the following qualities, however this list is not meant to be a “checklist” for applicants to meet all criteria:
A familiarity with HPC, not necessarily an HPC expert, but rather a scholar who could benefit from including advanced computing tools and methods into their existing computational work
A graduate student with a strong research plan or a postdoctoral fellow in the early stages of their research careers
Regular practice with, or interest in, parallel programming
Applicants from any research discipline are welcome, provided their research activities include computational work.
The first two days of the program comprise two tracks that run concurrently. You need to choose your preferred track in your application.
An introduction to shared-memory parallelism and accelerator programming.
Advanced distributed-memory programming.
School fees, meals and housing will be covered for all accepted applicants to the summer school. Reasonable flight costs will also be covered for those travelling to/from the school.
Why Do Enterprises Need Supercomputers? NCC for HPC at the Innovation Seminar6 Mar-Dňa 6. marca sme sa zúčastnili odborno-informačného seminára s názvom „Podpora inovácií pre zlepšenie rastu a rozvoja malého a stredného podnikania v Nitrianskom kraji“. Podujatie organizovalo Regionálne centrum Nitra MIRRI SR v spolupráci s Nitrianskym samosprávnym krajom, Slovenskou poľnohospodárskou univerzitou v Nitre, Slovenskou inovačnou a energetickou agentúrou (SIEA) a Výskumnou a inovačnou autoritou (VAIA).
Join us for the HPC User Day 2025!3 Mar-Máte záujem o vysokovýkonné výpočty? Využívate superpočítače alebo sa chcete dozvedieť viac o ich možnostiach? Pridajte sa k nám na HPC User Day 2025! Toto podujatie je určené nielen pre skúsených používateľov, ale aj pre tých, ktorí sa o HPC technológie začínajú zaujímať.
Protect Your Data! Tomorrow We Celebrate Safer Internet Day10 Feb-11. februára si pripomíname Deň bezpečnejšieho internetu (Safer Internet Day, SID), globálnu iniciatívu zameranú na zvýšenie povedomia o kybernetickej bezpečnosti a ochrane osobných údajov. Tento deň každoročne zdôrazňuje dôležitosť bezpečnosti v online priestore a podporuje aktivity, ktoré pomáhajú chrániť najmä mladých používateľov internetu.
Named Entity Recognition for Address Extraction in Speech-to-Text Transcriptions Using Synthetic Data
Many businesses spend large amounts of resources for communicating with clients. Usually, the goal is
to provide clients with information, but sometimes there is also a need to request specific information
from them.
In addressing this need, there has been a significant effort put into the development of chatbots
and voicebots, which on one hand serve the purpose of providing information to clients, but they can
also be utilized to contact a client with a request to provide some information.
A specific real-world example is to contact a client, via text or via phone, to update their postal address. The address may have possibly changed over time, so a business needs to update this information
in its internal client database.
illustrative image
Nonetheless, when requesting such information through novel channels|like chatbots or voicebots|
it is important to verify the validity and format of the address. In such cases, an address information
usually comes by a free-form text input or as a speech-to-text transcription. Such inputs may contain
substantial noise or variations in the address format. To this end it is necessary to lter out the noise
and extract corresponding entities, which constitute the actual address. This process of extracting
entities from an input text is known as Named Entity Recognition (NER). In our particular case we
deal with the following entities: municipality name, street name, house number, and postal code. This
technical report describes the development and evaluation of a NER system for extraction of such
information.
Problem Description and Our Approach
This work is a joint effort of Slovak National Competence Center for High-Performance Computing
and nettle, s.r.o., which is a Slovak-based start-up focusing on natural language processing, chatbots,
and voicebots. Our goal is to develop highly accurate and reliable NER model for address parsing. The
model accepts both free text as well as speech-to-text transcribed text. Our NER model constitutes
an important building block in real-world customer care systems, which can be employed in various
scenarios where address extraction is relevant.
The challenging aspect of this task was to handle data which was present exclusively in Slovak
language. This makes our choice of a baseline model very limited.
Currently, there are several publicly available NER models for the Slovak language. These models
are based on the general purpose pre-trained model SlovakBERT [1]. Unfortunately, all these models
support only a few entity types, while the support for entities relevant to address extraction is missing.
A straightforward utilization of popular Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT is not an option
in our use cases because of data privacy concerns and time delays caused by calls to these rather
time-consuming LLM APIs.
We propose a fine-tuning of SlovakBERT for NER. The NER task in our case is actually a classification task at the token level. We aim at achieving proficiency at address entities recognition with a
tiny number of real-world examples available. In Section 2.1 we describe our dataset as well as a data
creation process. The significant lack of available real-world data prompts us to generate synthetic
data to cope with data scarcity. In Section 2.2 we propose SlovakBERT modifications in order to train
it for our task. In Section 2.3 we explore iterative improvements in our data generation approach.
Finally, we present model performance results in Section 3.
Data
The aim of the task is to recognize street names, house numbers, municipality names, and postal codes
from the spoken sentences transcribed via speech-to-text. Only 69 instances of real-world collected
data were available. Furthermore, all of those instances were highly affected by noise, e.g., natural
speech hesitations and speech transcription glitches. Therefore, we use this data exclusively for testing.
Table 1 shows two examples from the collected dataset.
Table 1: Two example instances from our collected real-world dataset. The Sentence column show-
cases the original address text. The Tokenized text column contains tokenized sentence representation,
and the Tags column contains tags for the corresponding tokens. Note here that not every instance
necessarily contains all considered entity types. Some instances contain noise, while others have gram-
mar/spelling mistakes: The token \ Dalsie" is not a part of an address and the street name \bauerova"
is not capitalized.
Artificial generation of training dataset occurred as the only, but still viable option to tackle the
problem of data shortage. Inspired by the 69 real instances, we programmatically conducted numerous
external API calls to OpenAI to generate similar realistic-looking examples. BIO annotation scheme [2]
was used to label the dataset. This scheme is a method used in NLP to annotate tokens in a sequence
as the beginning (B), inside (I), or outside (O) of entities. We are using 9 annotations: O, B-Street,
I-Street, B-Housenumber, I-Housenumber, B-Municipality, I-Municipality, B-Postcode, I-Postcode.
We generated data in multiple iterations as described below in Section 2.3. Our final training
dataset consisted of more than 104
sentences/address examples. For data generation we used GPT3.5-turbo API along with some prompt engineering. Since the data generation through this API is
limited by the number of tokens — both generated as well as prompt tokens—we could not pass the
list of all possible Slovak street names and municipality names within the prompt. Hence, data was
generated with placeholders streetname and municipalityname only to be subsequently replaced
by randomly chosen street and municipality names from the list of street and municipality names,
respectively. A complete list of Slovak street and municipality names was obtained from the web pages
of the Ministry of Interior of the Slovak republic [3].
With the use of OpenAI API generative algorithm we were able to achieve organic sentences without
the need to manually generate the data, which sped up the process significantly. However, employing
this approach did not come without downsides. Many mistakes were present in the generated dataset,
mainly wrong annotations occurred and those had to be corrected manually. The generated dataset was split, so that 80% was used for model’s training, 15% for validation and 5% as synthetic test data,
so that we could compare the performance of the model on real test data as well as on artificial test
data.
Model Development and Training
Two general-purpose pre-trained models were utilized and compared: SlovakBERT [1] and a distilled
version of this model [4]. Herein we refer to the distilled version as DistilSlovakBERT. SlovakBERT
is an open-source pretrained model on Slovak language using a Masked Language Modeling (MLM)
objective. It was trained with a general Slovak web-based corpus, but it can be easily adapted to new
domains to solve new tasks [1]. DistilSlovakBERT is a pre-trained model obtained from SlovakBERT
model by a method called knowledge distillation, which significantly reduces the size of the model
while retaining 97% of its language understanding capabilities.
We modified both models by adding a token classification layer, obtaining in both cases models
suitable for NER tasks. The last classification layer consists of 9 neurons corresponding to 9 entity
annotations: We have 4 address parts and each is represented by two annotations – beginning and
inside of each entity, and one for the absence of any entity. The number of parameters for each model
and its components are summarized in Table 2.
Table 2: The number of parameters in our two NER models and their respective counts for the base
model and the classication head.
Models’ training was highly susceptible to overfitting. To tackle this and further enhance the
training process we used linear learning rate scheduler, weight decay strategies, and some other hyperparameter tuning strategies.
Computing resources of the HPC system Devana, operated by the Computing Centre, Centre of
operations of the Slovak Academy of Sciences were leveraged for model training, specifically utilizing
a GPU node with 1 NVidia A100 GPU. For a more convenient data analysis and debugging, an
interactive environment using OpenOnDemand was employed, which allows researches remote web
access to supercomputers.
The training process required only 10-20 epochs to converge for both models. Using the described
HPC setting, one epoch’s training time was on average 20 seconds for 9492 samples in the training
dataset for SlovakBERT and 12 seconds for DistilSlovakBERT. Inference on 69 samples takes 0.64
seconds for SlovakBERT and 0.37 seconds for DistilSlovakBERT, which demonstrates model’s efficiency
in real-time NLP pipelines.
Iterative Improvements
Although only 69 instances of real data were present, the complexity of it was quite challenging to
imitate in generated data. The generated dataset was created using several different prompts, resulting
in 11,306 sentences that resembled human-generated content. The work consisted of a number of
iterations. Each iteration can be split into the following steps: generate data, train a model, visualize
obtained prediction errors on real and artificial test datasets, and analyze. This way we identified
patterns that the model failed to recognize. Based on these insights we generated new data that
followed these newly identified patterns. The patterns we devised in various iterations are presented
in Table 3. With each newly expanded dataset both of our models were trained, with SlovakBERT’s
accuracy always exceeding the one of DistilSlovakBERT’s. Therefore, we have decided to further utilize
only SlovakBERT as a base model.
Results
The confusion matrix corresponding to the results obtained using model trained in Iteration 1 (see
Table 3)—is displayed in Table 4. This model was able to correctly recognize only 67.51% of entities in test dataset. Granular examination of errors revealed that training dataset does not represent the
real-world sentences well enough and there is high need to generate more and better representative
data. In Table 4 it is evident, that the most common error was identification of a municipality as a
street. We noticed that this occurred when municipality name appeared before the street name in the
address. As a result, this led to data generation with Iteration 2 and Iteration 3.
Table 3: The iterative improvements of data generation. Each prompt was used twice: First with and
then without noise, i.e., natural human speech hesitations. Sometimes, if mentioned, prompt allowed
to shue or omit some address parts.
This process of detailed analysis of prediction errors and subsequent data generation accounts for
most of the improvements in the accuracy of our model. The goal was to achieve more than 90%
accuracy on test data. Model’s predictive accuracy kept increasing with systematic data generation.
Eventually, the whole dataset was duplicated, with the duplicities being in uppercase/lowercase. (The
utilized pre-trained model is case sensitive and some test instances contained street and municipality
names in lowercase.) This made the model more robust to the form in which it receives input and led
to final accuracy of 93.06%. Confusion matrix of the final model can be seen in Table 5.
Table 4: Confusion matrix of model trained on dataset from the rst iteration, reaching model's
predictive accuracy of 67.51%.
Table 5: Confusion matrix of the nal model with the predictive accuracy of 93.06%. Comparing the
results to the results in Table 4, we can see that the accuracy increased by 25.55%.
There are still some errors; notably, tokens that should have been tagged as outside were occasionally misclassified as municipality. We have opted not to tackle this issue further, as it happens
on words that may resemble subparts of our entity names, but, in reality, do not represent entities
themselves. See an example below in Table 6.
Table 6: Examples of the nal model's predictions for two test sentences. The rst sentence contains
one incorrectly classied token: the third token \Kal" with ground truth label O was predicted as
B-Municipality. The misclassication of \Kal" as a municipality occurred due to its similarity to
subwords found in \Kalsa", but ground truth labeling was based on context and authors' judgment.
The second sentence has all its tokens classied correctly.
Conclusions
In this technical report we trained a NER model built upon SlovakBERT pre-trained LLM model as
the base. The model was trained and validated exclusively on artificially generated dataset. This well
representative and high quality synthetic data was iteratively expanded. Together with hyperparameter fine-tuning this iterative approach allowed us to reach predictive accuracy on real dataset exceeding
90%. Since the real dataset contained a mere 69 instances, we decided to use it only for testing.
Despite the limited amount of real data, our model exhibits promising performance. This approach
emphasizes the potential of using exclusively synthetic dataset, especially in cases where the amount
of real data is not sufficient for training.
This model can be utilized in real-world applications within NLP pipelines to extract and verify the
correctness of addresses transcribed by speech-to-text mechanisms. In case a larger real-world dataset
is available, we recommend to retrain the model and possibly also expand the synthetic dataset with
more generated data, as the existing dataset might not represent potentially new occurring data
patterns. This model can be utilized in real-world applications within NLP pipelines to extract and verify the
correctness of addresses transcribed by speech-to-text mechanisms. In case a larger real-world dataset
is available, we recommend to retrain the model and possibly also expand the synthetic dataset with
more generated data, as the existing dataset might not represent potentially new occurring data
patterns. The model is available on https://huggingface.co/nettle-ai/slovakbert-address-ner
Acknowledgement
The research results were obtained with the support of the Slovak National competence centre for
HPC, the EuroCC 2 project and Slovak National Supercomputing Centre under grant agreement
101101903-EuroCC 2-DIGITAL-EUROHPC-JU-2022-NCC-01.
AUTHORS
Bibiána Lajčinová – Slovak National Supercomputing Centre
Patrik Valábek – Slovak National Supercomputing Centre, ) Institute of Information Engineering, Automation, and Mathematics, Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava
[1] Matús Pikuliak, Stefan Grivalsky, Martin Konopka, Miroslav Blsták, Martin Tamajka, Viktor Bachratý, Marián Simko, Pavol Balázik, Michal Trnka, and Filip Uhlárik. Slovakbert: Slovak masked language model. CoRR, abs/2109.15254, 2021.
[2] Lance Ramshaw and Mitch Marcus. Text chunking using transformation-based learning. In Third Workshop on Very Large Corpora, 1995.
[3] Ministerstvo vnútra Slovenskej republiky. Register adries. https://data.gov.sk/dataset/register-adries-register-ulic. Accessed: August 21, 2023.
[4] Ivan Agarský. Hugging face model hub. https://huggingface.co/crabz/distil-slovakbert, 2022. Accessed: September 15, 2023.
Intent Classification for Bank Chatbots through LLM Fine-Tuning12 Sep-Tento článok hodnotí použitie veľkých jazykových modelov na klasifikáciu intentov v chatbote s preddefinovanými odpoveďami, určenom pre webové stránky bankového sektora. Zameriavame sa na efektivitu modelu SlovakBERT a porovnávame ho s použitím multilingválnych generatívnych modelov, ako sú Llama 8b instruct a Gemma 7b instruct, v ich predtrénovaných aj fine-tunovaných verziách. Výsledky naznačujú, že SlovakBERT dosahuje lepšie výsledky než ostatné modely, a to v presnosti klasifikácie ako aj v miere falošne pozitívnych predikcií.
Leveraging LLMs for Efficient Religious Text Analysis5 Aug-The analysis and research of texts with religious themes have historically been the domain of philosophers, theologians, and other social sciences specialists. With the advent of artificial intelligence, such as the large language models (LLMs), this task takes on new dimensions. These technologies can be leveraged to reveal various insights and nuances contained in religious texts — interpreting their symbolism and uncovering their meanings. This acceleration of the analytical process allows researchers to focus on specific aspects of texts relevant to their studies.
Mapping Tree Positions and Heights Using PointCloud Data Obtained Using LiDAR Technology25 Jul-Cieľom spolupráce medzi Národným superpočítačovým centrom (NSCC) a firmou SKYMOVE, v rámci projektu Národného kompetenčného centra pre HPC, bol návrh a implementácia pilotného softvérového riešenia pre spracovanie dát získaných technológiou LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) umiestnených na dronoch.
New call for proposal for the Slovak scientific community: access to Leonardo supercomputer
The Leonardo Consortium, composed of six European countries led by Italy, procured and in November 2022 put into operation the currently sixth most powerful supercomputer in the world Slovakia, as one of the consortium members, provides its expertise in the field of HPC through the Computing Center of the Slovak Academy of Sciences and offers high-level technical and engineering support to user communities. Thanks to this collaboration, Slovak users have a unique opportunity to participate in a national call and gain access to the Leonardo system.
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
Why Do Enterprises Need Supercomputers? NCC for HPC at the Innovation Seminar6 Mar-Dňa 6. marca sme sa zúčastnili odborno-informačného seminára s názvom „Podpora inovácií pre zlepšenie rastu a rozvoja malého a stredného podnikania v Nitrianskom kraji“. Podujatie organizovalo Regionálne centrum Nitra MIRRI SR v spolupráci s Nitrianskym samosprávnym krajom, Slovenskou poľnohospodárskou univerzitou v Nitre, Slovenskou inovačnou a energetickou agentúrou (SIEA) a Výskumnou a inovačnou autoritou (VAIA).
Join us for the HPC User Day 2025!3 Mar-Máte záujem o vysokovýkonné výpočty? Využívate superpočítače alebo sa chcete dozvedieť viac o ich možnostiach? Pridajte sa k nám na HPC User Day 2025! Toto podujatie je určené nielen pre skúsených používateľov, ale aj pre tých, ktorí sa o HPC technológie začínajú zaujímať.
Protect Your Data! Tomorrow We Celebrate Safer Internet Day10 Feb-11. februára si pripomíname Deň bezpečnejšieho internetu (Safer Internet Day, SID), globálnu iniciatívu zameranú na zvýšenie povedomia o kybernetickej bezpečnosti a ochrane osobných údajov. Tento deň každoročne zdôrazňuje dôležitosť bezpečnosti v online priestore a podporuje aktivity, ktoré pomáhajú chrániť najmä mladých používateľov internetu.
Supercomputer Leonardo for the Slovak scientific community
The Leonardo Consortium, composed of six European countries led by Italy, procured and in November 2022 put into operation the currently sixth most powerful supercomputer in the world . Slovensko, ako jeden z členov konzorcia, poskytuje prostredníctvom Výpočtového strediska Slovenskej akadémie vied projektu svoje odborné znalosti v oblasti HPC a komunitám používateľov technickú a inžiniersku podporu na vysokej úrovni. Slovenskí používatelia majú vďaka tomu jedinečnú možnosť zapojiť sa do národnej výzvy a získať prístup na systém Leonardo.
Superpočítač Leonardo má výkon približne 250 PFlop/s, pričom celková alokácia dostupná pre slovenské projekty je 56 000 GPU nód-hodín a 25 000 CPU nód-hodín ročne. Computing Center of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, preto v spolupráci s National Supercomputing Center, 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.
Výzva je otvorená do 31.1. 2024. Vyhodnotenie a vybrané projekty budú zverejnené dva týždne po uzávierke, úspešní riešitelia budú o ďalšom postupe informovaní mailom. Jednotlivé projekty budú hodnotené odborným personálom VS SAV a NSCC s ohľadom na vedecký prínos a čo najefektívnejšie využitie výpočtových kapacít. Projekty s maximálnou dĺžkou trvania 12 mesiacov je možné podať prostredníctvom používateľského portálu register.nscc.sk . Po registrácii je potrebné vyplniť formulár v sekcii The projecty / Leonardo projekt.
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
Regionálny workshop národných kompetenčných centier v strednej Európe
Representatives of National Competence Centres for HPC from the Central European region met on December 6th at the second meeting of the Central European NCC working group. The hybrid event was organized by NCC Poland in Krakow. The workshop was attended by competence centers for HPC from Poland, Austria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia and Hungary.
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!
Why Do Enterprises Need Supercomputers? NCC for HPC at the Innovation Seminar6 Mar-Dňa 6. marca sme sa zúčastnili odborno-informačného seminára s názvom „Podpora inovácií pre zlepšenie rastu a rozvoja malého a stredného podnikania v Nitrianskom kraji“. Podujatie organizovalo Regionálne centrum Nitra MIRRI SR v spolupráci s Nitrianskym samosprávnym krajom, Slovenskou poľnohospodárskou univerzitou v Nitre, Slovenskou inovačnou a energetickou agentúrou (SIEA) a Výskumnou a inovačnou autoritou (VAIA).
Join us for the HPC User Day 2025!3 Mar-Máte záujem o vysokovýkonné výpočty? Využívate superpočítače alebo sa chcete dozvedieť viac o ich možnostiach? Pridajte sa k nám na HPC User Day 2025! Toto podujatie je určené nielen pre skúsených používateľov, ale aj pre tých, ktorí sa o HPC technológie začínajú zaujímať.
Protect Your Data! Tomorrow We Celebrate Safer Internet Day10 Feb-11. februára si pripomíname Deň bezpečnejšieho internetu (Safer Internet Day, SID), globálnu iniciatívu zameranú na zvýšenie povedomia o kybernetickej bezpečnosti a ochrane osobných údajov. Tento deň každoročne zdôrazňuje dôležitosť bezpečnosti v online priestore a podporuje aktivity, ktoré pomáhajú chrániť najmä mladých používateľov internetu.
We are excited to announce that the Superheroes 4 Science (S4S)vol.2 kick-off meeting was held in Bratislava, Slovakia from November 28-30. The project aims to introduce the younger generation to the fascinating world of high-performance computing and focuses on creating interactive educational materials on topics such as supercomputers, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing. Teams from the Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovakia gathered at the introductory project meeting in Bratislava. It was a highly productive three days during which we had the opportunity to plan the development of various interesting educational activities and materials for you.
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
Why Do Enterprises Need Supercomputers? NCC for HPC at the Innovation Seminar6 Mar-Dňa 6. marca sme sa zúčastnili odborno-informačného seminára s názvom „Podpora inovácií pre zlepšenie rastu a rozvoja malého a stredného podnikania v Nitrianskom kraji“. Podujatie organizovalo Regionálne centrum Nitra MIRRI SR v spolupráci s Nitrianskym samosprávnym krajom, Slovenskou poľnohospodárskou univerzitou v Nitre, Slovenskou inovačnou a energetickou agentúrou (SIEA) a Výskumnou a inovačnou autoritou (VAIA).
Join us for the HPC User Day 2025!3 Mar-Máte záujem o vysokovýkonné výpočty? Využívate superpočítače alebo sa chcete dozvedieť viac o ich možnostiach? Pridajte sa k nám na HPC User Day 2025! Toto podujatie je určené nielen pre skúsených používateľov, ale aj pre tých, ktorí sa o HPC technológie začínajú zaujímať.
Protect Your Data! Tomorrow We Celebrate Safer Internet Day10 Feb-11. februára si pripomíname Deň bezpečnejšieho internetu (Safer Internet Day, SID), globálnu iniciatívu zameranú na zvýšenie povedomia o kybernetickej bezpečnosti a ochrane osobných údajov. Tento deň každoročne zdôrazňuje dôležitosť bezpečnosti v online priestore a podporuje aktivity, ktoré pomáhajú chrániť najmä mladých používateľov internetu.
We invite you to the EuroHPC user day which will be held on December 11, 2023 in Brussels from 9:00 am to 6:00 pm. The event will bring together EuroHPC users and provide them with an opportunity to learn more about the various topics and opportunities offered by the EuroHPC JU.
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.
Why Do Enterprises Need Supercomputers? NCC for HPC at the Innovation Seminar6 Mar-Dňa 6. marca sme sa zúčastnili odborno-informačného seminára s názvom „Podpora inovácií pre zlepšenie rastu a rozvoja malého a stredného podnikania v Nitrianskom kraji“. Podujatie organizovalo Regionálne centrum Nitra MIRRI SR v spolupráci s Nitrianskym samosprávnym krajom, Slovenskou poľnohospodárskou univerzitou v Nitre, Slovenskou inovačnou a energetickou agentúrou (SIEA) a Výskumnou a inovačnou autoritou (VAIA).
Join us for the HPC User Day 2025!3 Mar-Máte záujem o vysokovýkonné výpočty? Využívate superpočítače alebo sa chcete dozvedieť viac o ich možnostiach? Pridajte sa k nám na HPC User Day 2025! Toto podujatie je určené nielen pre skúsených používateľov, ale aj pre tých, ktorí sa o HPC technológie začínajú zaujímať.
Protect Your Data! Tomorrow We Celebrate Safer Internet Day10 Feb-11. februára si pripomíname Deň bezpečnejšieho internetu (Safer Internet Day, SID), globálnu iniciatívu zameranú na zvýšenie povedomia o kybernetickej bezpečnosti a ochrane osobných údajov. Tento deň každoročne zdôrazňuje dôležitosť bezpečnosti v online priestore a podporuje aktivity, ktoré pomáhajú chrániť najmä mladých používateľov internetu.
EuroCC Supercomputing Accelerator webinar: Explainable AI
EuroCC
Slovakia has joined the #EuroCC Supercomputing Accelerator. The
Supercomputing accelerator is a one-stop shop for adopting
supercomputing to your advantage and save money. Join
us for our webinar, which will be on the topic of: Explainable #AI
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.
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.
Why Do Enterprises Need Supercomputers? NCC for HPC at the Innovation Seminar6 Mar-Dňa 6. marca sme sa zúčastnili odborno-informačného seminára s názvom „Podpora inovácií pre zlepšenie rastu a rozvoja malého a stredného podnikania v Nitrianskom kraji“. Podujatie organizovalo Regionálne centrum Nitra MIRRI SR v spolupráci s Nitrianskym samosprávnym krajom, Slovenskou poľnohospodárskou univerzitou v Nitre, Slovenskou inovačnou a energetickou agentúrou (SIEA) a Výskumnou a inovačnou autoritou (VAIA).
Join us for the HPC User Day 2025!3 Mar-Máte záujem o vysokovýkonné výpočty? Využívate superpočítače alebo sa chcete dozvedieť viac o ich možnostiach? Pridajte sa k nám na HPC User Day 2025! Toto podujatie je určené nielen pre skúsených používateľov, ale aj pre tých, ktorí sa o HPC technológie začínajú zaujímať.
Protect Your Data! Tomorrow We Celebrate Safer Internet Day10 Feb-11. februára si pripomíname Deň bezpečnejšieho internetu (Safer Internet Day, SID), globálnu iniciatívu zameranú na zvýšenie povedomia o kybernetickej bezpečnosti a ochrane osobných údajov. Tento deň každoročne zdôrazňuje dôležitosť bezpečnosti v online priestore a podporuje aktivity, ktoré pomáhajú chrániť najmä mladých používateľov internetu.
NCC and CoE Collaboration: BioExcel Workshop on GROMACS and HADDOCK
On October 18 and 19, 2023, a workshop focused on working with GROMACS and HADDOCK software tools was held in Bratislava. The workshop was the result of cooperation between competence centers in Slovakia, v Austria, Czech Republic and Hungary with BioExcel center of excellence. The BioExcel CoE team develops both applications, so experienced lecturers could not only show common simulations and modeling, but also answer specific questions from participants.
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.
Why Do Enterprises Need Supercomputers? NCC for HPC at the Innovation Seminar6 Mar-Dňa 6. marca sme sa zúčastnili odborno-informačného seminára s názvom „Podpora inovácií pre zlepšenie rastu a rozvoja malého a stredného podnikania v Nitrianskom kraji“. Podujatie organizovalo Regionálne centrum Nitra MIRRI SR v spolupráci s Nitrianskym samosprávnym krajom, Slovenskou poľnohospodárskou univerzitou v Nitre, Slovenskou inovačnou a energetickou agentúrou (SIEA) a Výskumnou a inovačnou autoritou (VAIA).
Join us for the HPC User Day 2025!3 Mar-Máte záujem o vysokovýkonné výpočty? Využívate superpočítače alebo sa chcete dozvedieť viac o ich možnostiach? Pridajte sa k nám na HPC User Day 2025! Toto podujatie je určené nielen pre skúsených používateľov, ale aj pre tých, ktorí sa o HPC technológie začínajú zaujímať.
Protect Your Data! Tomorrow We Celebrate Safer Internet Day10 Feb-11. februára si pripomíname Deň bezpečnejšieho internetu (Safer Internet Day, SID), globálnu iniciatívu zameranú na zvýšenie povedomia o kybernetickej bezpečnosti a ochrane osobných údajov. Tento deň každoročne zdôrazňuje dôležitosť bezpečnosti v online priestore a podporuje aktivity, ktoré pomáhajú chrániť najmä mladých používateľov internetu.
Up to 43% of cyber attacks are aimed at small and medium-sized businesses
Last year, up to 40% of small businesses reported data loss as a result of a cyber attack, causing them significant operational disruption, financial loss, reputational damage and customer churn due to concerns about the security and protection of their personal data.
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.
Why Do Enterprises Need Supercomputers? NCC for HPC at the Innovation Seminar6 Mar-Dňa 6. marca sme sa zúčastnili odborno-informačného seminára s názvom „Podpora inovácií pre zlepšenie rastu a rozvoja malého a stredného podnikania v Nitrianskom kraji“. Podujatie organizovalo Regionálne centrum Nitra MIRRI SR v spolupráci s Nitrianskym samosprávnym krajom, Slovenskou poľnohospodárskou univerzitou v Nitre, Slovenskou inovačnou a energetickou agentúrou (SIEA) a Výskumnou a inovačnou autoritou (VAIA).
Join us for the HPC User Day 2025!3 Mar-Máte záujem o vysokovýkonné výpočty? Využívate superpočítače alebo sa chcete dozvedieť viac o ich možnostiach? Pridajte sa k nám na HPC User Day 2025! Toto podujatie je určené nielen pre skúsených používateľov, ale aj pre tých, ktorí sa o HPC technológie začínajú zaujímať.
Protect Your Data! Tomorrow We Celebrate Safer Internet Day10 Feb-11. februára si pripomíname Deň bezpečnejšieho internetu (Safer Internet Day, SID), globálnu iniciatívu zameranú na zvýšenie povedomia o kybernetickej bezpečnosti a ochrane osobných údajov. Tento deň každoročne zdôrazňuje dôležitosť bezpečnosti v online priestore a podporuje aktivity, ktoré pomáhajú chrániť najmä mladých používateľov internetu.
Why Do Enterprises Need Supercomputers? NCC for HPC at the Innovation Seminar 6 Mar - Dňa 6. marca sme sa zúčastnili odborno-informačného seminára s názvom „Podpora inovácií pre zlepšenie rastu a rozvoja malého a stredného podnikania v Nitrianskom kraji“. Podujatie organizovalo Regionálne centrum Nitra MIRRI SR v spolupráci s Nitrianskym samosprávnym krajom, Slovenskou poľnohospodárskou univerzitou v Nitre, Slovenskou inovačnou a energetickou agentúrou (SIEA) a Výskumnou a inovačnou autoritou (VAIA).
Join us for the HPC User Day 2025! 3 Mar - Máte záujem o vysokovýkonné výpočty? Využívate superpočítače alebo sa chcete dozvedieť viac o ich možnostiach? Pridajte sa k nám na HPC User Day 2025! Toto podujatie je určené nielen pre skúsených používateľov, ale aj pre tých, ktorí sa o HPC technológie začínajú zaujímať.
Protect Your Data! Tomorrow We Celebrate Safer Internet Day 10 Feb - 11. februára si pripomíname Deň bezpečnejšieho internetu (Safer Internet Day, SID), globálnu iniciatívu zameranú na zvýšenie povedomia o kybernetickej bezpečnosti a ochrane osobných údajov. Tento deň každoročne zdôrazňuje dôležitosť bezpečnosti v online priestore a podporuje aktivity, ktoré pomáhajú chrániť najmä mladých používateľov internetu.
