Zabezpečenie digitálnych hraníc zajtrajška: Qubit Conference® stanovuje nové trendy kybernetickej bezpečnosti v strednej Európe
The event, known for its high-quality lineup of expert lectures and top-notch speakers from around the world, has become a hub for building relationships, sharing progressive ideas, technologies, and strategies that shape the future of digital security for both small and large enterprises. The Qubit Conference® has become a must-attend event for professionals who want to keep up with the latest trends and innovations in cybersecurity, resulting in its growing not only in the number of participants year by year, but also in its impact on the industry.
The conference annually welcomes over 500 participants from dozens of countries, of which an average of 44% are new attendees seeking innovation and challenges in the field of cybersecurity. According to the latest Qubit Conference® satisfaction survey, 100% of the participants proudly state that they would recommend the conference to anyone looking for exceptional experiences in cybersecurity.
Uncovering Trends, Solutions, and a Unique Opportunity for Networking
Digital trends, as well as the threats associated with them, are always at the center of attention. The conference regularly hosts representatives from technology companies that are at the forefront of innovations in cybersecurity. Presentations and workshops focus on introducing revolutionary solutions that change the paradigm in the fight against cyber threats.
Participants can expect concrete examples of implementations and guidance on how to integrate these innovations into their security strategies. This is not just theoretical, as an audience member, but also practical, through interactive workshops where each participant can try out the implementation of new technologies and solutions. This provides numerous opportunities to acquire new skills and understand their practical applications
The Qubit Expo showcases companies that bring the latest innovations in software, hardware, data analysis, and other areas that push the boundaries of what is possible in digital security. With rapid technological advances, there comes a unique opportunity for networking. Discussions and workshops provide participants with opportunities to create new professional or business connections.
Qubit Conference® It is undoubtedly an event that pushes the boundaries of knowledge, innovation, and networking in the field of cybersecurity. This is evidenced by the latest Qubit Conference® satisfaction survey, in which a significant majority, up to 97% of participants, express interest in attending future workshops and training sessions prepared by Qubit in the near future. Additionally, as many as 94% of participants confirm that all educational activities of the Qubit Conference® are focused on current trends. Furthermore, for more than 4/5 of the participants (83%), the conference represents an excellent opportunity for creating new professional relationships or acquiring potential customers.
For the first time on the stage, cyber protection for small and medium-sized enterprises
The Qubit Conference® definitely confirms its position as a leading technology event in Central Europe. This autumn, it launched a series of webinars and cybersecurity training sessions for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). This initiative responds to the growing need to secure digital infrastructure for smaller businesses, which are increasingly exposed to complex cyber threats.
The discussion on the stage was rich in expert perspectives from professionals with extensive experience in cyber protection. The topic of discussion was not only the current threats but also specific strategies and tools that SMEs can implement to enhance their cyber resilience. The concluding panel discussion offered the attending SMEs an invaluable opportunity to interact directly with the experts and obtain specific advice for their individual needs.
The year 2024 will open the debate on the human touch in advanced technologies
The Qubit Conference® proves that it is more than just a one-time event. The organizers have already announced plans to expand and strengthen the community that is emerging within the conference. This will include a regular series of workshops and meetings, which will allow cybersecurity, IT, and innovation experts to maintain contacts and collaborate even after the conference itself has ended.
As Katarína Gamboš, the Senior Event Producer of Qubit Conference®, states, "The year 2024 will not only bring a new beginning but also a revolution in how we perceive and integrate the human touch into advanced technologies. The theme of the upcoming Qubit Conference® Prague 2024, 'Bringing humans back to cyber,' introduces into the discussion the value of the human factor in an era where technological progress moves at an incredible speed. 'Bringing humans back to cyber' is not just a slogan, but also an opportunity for experts from around the world to share their views and ideas on how we should perceive and incorporate the human factor into technological innovations. At Qubit Conference® Prague 2024, our goal is to open a discussion about how we, as individuals, can ensure that technological progress contributes to the benefit of the whole society and maintains ethical standards."
Meaningful Collaboration: The National Supercomputing Centre and TUKE Explore Common Ground16 Jun-Lucia Malíčková, Project Coordinator at the National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC Slovakia) and the National Competence Centre for High-Performance Computing (NCC for HPC), met with Associate Professor Maroš Halama, PhD, from the Faculty of Materials, Metallurgy and Recycling at the Technical University of Košice. Their discussion focused on opportunities for closer collaboration in research, computational technologies, and support for young researchers.
Nová éra spolupráce v slovenskom HPC: Začíname budovať HPC ekosysém spolu s Eviden13 Jun-V slovenskom HPC ekosystéme sa začína nové, mimoriadne zaujímavé obdobie. Ako ste už určite zachytili, Slovenská akadémia vied realizuje projekt s názvom „Budovanie superpočítača pre Národné superpočítačové centrum“, ktorý prinesie novú výpočtovú infraštruktúru pre potreby vedy, výskumu, inovácií aj verejných služieb. Ako Národné superpočítačové centrum sme radi, že môžeme byť pri tom – a stáť pri zrode spolupráce, ktorá má potenciál významne ovplyvniť ďalší rozvoj tejto oblasti na Slovensku. Hovoríme o začiatku partnerstva medzi Národným superpočítačovým centrom a spoločnosťou Atos Eviden, ktorá tento stroj dodáva.
NSCC a NCC pre HPC na veľtrhu Portugal Smart Cities Summit 2025 12 Jun-Ako budú vyzerať mestá budúcnosti? Aké technológie ich premenia na inteligentné, udržateľné a inkluzívne prostredia pre život a prácu? Aj o tom sa hovorilo na Portugal Smart Cities Summit, jednom z najväčších veľtrhov zameraných na smart technológie, ktorý sa konal od 3. do 5. júna 2025 v Lisabone.
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.
Meaningful Collaboration: The National Supercomputing Centre and TUKE Explore Common Ground16 Jun-Lucia Malíčková, Project Coordinator at the National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC Slovakia) and the National Competence Centre for High-Performance Computing (NCC for HPC), met with Associate Professor Maroš Halama, PhD, from the Faculty of Materials, Metallurgy and Recycling at the Technical University of Košice. Their discussion focused on opportunities for closer collaboration in research, computational technologies, and support for young researchers.
Nová éra spolupráce v slovenskom HPC: Začíname budovať HPC ekosysém spolu s Eviden13 Jun-V slovenskom HPC ekosystéme sa začína nové, mimoriadne zaujímavé obdobie. Ako ste už určite zachytili, Slovenská akadémia vied realizuje projekt s názvom „Budovanie superpočítača pre Národné superpočítačové centrum“, ktorý prinesie novú výpočtovú infraštruktúru pre potreby vedy, výskumu, inovácií aj verejných služieb. Ako Národné superpočítačové centrum sme radi, že môžeme byť pri tom – a stáť pri zrode spolupráce, ktorá má potenciál významne ovplyvniť ďalší rozvoj tejto oblasti na Slovensku. Hovoríme o začiatku partnerstva medzi Národným superpočítačovým centrom a spoločnosťou Atos Eviden, ktorá tento stroj dodáva.
NSCC a NCC pre HPC na veľtrhu Portugal Smart Cities Summit 2025 12 Jun-Ako budú vyzerať mestá budúcnosti? Aké technológie ich premenia na inteligentné, udržateľné a inkluzívne prostredia pre život a prácu? Aj o tom sa hovorilo na Portugal Smart Cities Summit, jednom z najväčších veľtrhov zameraných na smart technológie, ktorý sa konal od 3. do 5. júna 2025 v Lisabone.
Devana: Call for Standard HPC access projects 1/24
The Computing Center of the Slovak Academy of Sciences and the National Supercomputing Center are opening the first Call for Projects for Standard Access to HPC 1/24. Projects are possible continuously, while there are 3 closing dates as standard during the year, after which the evaluation will take place until the submitted applications. It is possible to apply for access through the register.nscc.sk user portal register.nscc.sk .
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: 4.1.2024 Call closing date: 31.1. 2024, 17:00 CET Communication of allocation decision: Up to 2 weeks from Call closing. Start of the allocation perion for awarded projects: no later than 15. 2. 2024
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.
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.).
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
Meaningful Collaboration: The National Supercomputing Centre and TUKE Explore Common Ground16 Jun-Lucia Malíčková, Project Coordinator at the National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC Slovakia) and the National Competence Centre for High-Performance Computing (NCC for HPC), met with Associate Professor Maroš Halama, PhD, from the Faculty of Materials, Metallurgy and Recycling at the Technical University of Košice. Their discussion focused on opportunities for closer collaboration in research, computational technologies, and support for young researchers.
Nová éra spolupráce v slovenskom HPC: Začíname budovať HPC ekosysém spolu s Eviden13 Jun-V slovenskom HPC ekosystéme sa začína nové, mimoriadne zaujímavé obdobie. Ako ste už určite zachytili, Slovenská akadémia vied realizuje projekt s názvom „Budovanie superpočítača pre Národné superpočítačové centrum“, ktorý prinesie novú výpočtovú infraštruktúru pre potreby vedy, výskumu, inovácií aj verejných služieb. Ako Národné superpočítačové centrum sme radi, že môžeme byť pri tom – a stáť pri zrode spolupráce, ktorá má potenciál významne ovplyvniť ďalší rozvoj tejto oblasti na Slovensku. Hovoríme o začiatku partnerstva medzi Národným superpočítačovým centrom a spoločnosťou Atos Eviden, ktorá tento stroj dodáva.
NSCC a NCC pre HPC na veľtrhu Portugal Smart Cities Summit 2025 12 Jun-Ako budú vyzerať mestá budúcnosti? Aké technológie ich premenia na inteligentné, udržateľné a inkluzívne prostredia pre život a prácu? Aj o tom sa hovorilo na Portugal Smart Cities Summit, jednom z najväčších veľtrhov zameraných na smart technológie, ktorý sa konal od 3. do 5. júna 2025 v Lisabone.
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!
Meaningful Collaboration: The National Supercomputing Centre and TUKE Explore Common Ground16 Jun-Lucia Malíčková, Project Coordinator at the National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC Slovakia) and the National Competence Centre for High-Performance Computing (NCC for HPC), met with Associate Professor Maroš Halama, PhD, from the Faculty of Materials, Metallurgy and Recycling at the Technical University of Košice. Their discussion focused on opportunities for closer collaboration in research, computational technologies, and support for young researchers.
Nová éra spolupráce v slovenskom HPC: Začíname budovať HPC ekosysém spolu s Eviden13 Jun-V slovenskom HPC ekosystéme sa začína nové, mimoriadne zaujímavé obdobie. Ako ste už určite zachytili, Slovenská akadémia vied realizuje projekt s názvom „Budovanie superpočítača pre Národné superpočítačové centrum“, ktorý prinesie novú výpočtovú infraštruktúru pre potreby vedy, výskumu, inovácií aj verejných služieb. Ako Národné superpočítačové centrum sme radi, že môžeme byť pri tom – a stáť pri zrode spolupráce, ktorá má potenciál významne ovplyvniť ďalší rozvoj tejto oblasti na Slovensku. Hovoríme o začiatku partnerstva medzi Národným superpočítačovým centrom a spoločnosťou Atos Eviden, ktorá tento stroj dodáva.
NSCC a NCC pre HPC na veľtrhu Portugal Smart Cities Summit 2025 12 Jun-Ako budú vyzerať mestá budúcnosti? Aké technológie ich premenia na inteligentné, udržateľné a inkluzívne prostredia pre život a prácu? Aj o tom sa hovorilo na Portugal Smart Cities Summit, jednom z najväčších veľtrhov zameraných na smart technológie, ktorý sa konal od 3. do 5. júna 2025 v Lisabone.
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
Meaningful Collaboration: The National Supercomputing Centre and TUKE Explore Common Ground16 Jun-Lucia Malíčková, Project Coordinator at the National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC Slovakia) and the National Competence Centre for High-Performance Computing (NCC for HPC), met with Associate Professor Maroš Halama, PhD, from the Faculty of Materials, Metallurgy and Recycling at the Technical University of Košice. Their discussion focused on opportunities for closer collaboration in research, computational technologies, and support for young researchers.
Nová éra spolupráce v slovenskom HPC: Začíname budovať HPC ekosysém spolu s Eviden13 Jun-V slovenskom HPC ekosystéme sa začína nové, mimoriadne zaujímavé obdobie. Ako ste už určite zachytili, Slovenská akadémia vied realizuje projekt s názvom „Budovanie superpočítača pre Národné superpočítačové centrum“, ktorý prinesie novú výpočtovú infraštruktúru pre potreby vedy, výskumu, inovácií aj verejných služieb. Ako Národné superpočítačové centrum sme radi, že môžeme byť pri tom – a stáť pri zrode spolupráce, ktorá má potenciál významne ovplyvniť ďalší rozvoj tejto oblasti na Slovensku. Hovoríme o začiatku partnerstva medzi Národným superpočítačovým centrom a spoločnosťou Atos Eviden, ktorá tento stroj dodáva.
NSCC a NCC pre HPC na veľtrhu Portugal Smart Cities Summit 2025 12 Jun-Ako budú vyzerať mestá budúcnosti? Aké technológie ich premenia na inteligentné, udržateľné a inkluzívne prostredia pre život a prácu? Aj o tom sa hovorilo na Portugal Smart Cities Summit, jednom z najväčších veľtrhov zameraných na smart technológie, ktorý sa konal od 3. do 5. júna 2025 v Lisabone.
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.
Meaningful Collaboration: The National Supercomputing Centre and TUKE Explore Common Ground16 Jun-Lucia Malíčková, Project Coordinator at the National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC Slovakia) and the National Competence Centre for High-Performance Computing (NCC for HPC), met with Associate Professor Maroš Halama, PhD, from the Faculty of Materials, Metallurgy and Recycling at the Technical University of Košice. Their discussion focused on opportunities for closer collaboration in research, computational technologies, and support for young researchers.
Nová éra spolupráce v slovenskom HPC: Začíname budovať HPC ekosysém spolu s Eviden13 Jun-V slovenskom HPC ekosystéme sa začína nové, mimoriadne zaujímavé obdobie. Ako ste už určite zachytili, Slovenská akadémia vied realizuje projekt s názvom „Budovanie superpočítača pre Národné superpočítačové centrum“, ktorý prinesie novú výpočtovú infraštruktúru pre potreby vedy, výskumu, inovácií aj verejných služieb. Ako Národné superpočítačové centrum sme radi, že môžeme byť pri tom – a stáť pri zrode spolupráce, ktorá má potenciál významne ovplyvniť ďalší rozvoj tejto oblasti na Slovensku. Hovoríme o začiatku partnerstva medzi Národným superpočítačovým centrom a spoločnosťou Atos Eviden, ktorá tento stroj dodáva.
NSCC a NCC pre HPC na veľtrhu Portugal Smart Cities Summit 2025 12 Jun-Ako budú vyzerať mestá budúcnosti? Aké technológie ich premenia na inteligentné, udržateľné a inkluzívne prostredia pre život a prácu? Aj o tom sa hovorilo na Portugal Smart Cities Summit, jednom z najväčších veľtrhov zameraných na smart technológie, ktorý sa konal od 3. do 5. júna 2025 v Lisabone.
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.
Meaningful Collaboration: The National Supercomputing Centre and TUKE Explore Common Ground16 Jun-Lucia Malíčková, Project Coordinator at the National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC Slovakia) and the National Competence Centre for High-Performance Computing (NCC for HPC), met with Associate Professor Maroš Halama, PhD, from the Faculty of Materials, Metallurgy and Recycling at the Technical University of Košice. Their discussion focused on opportunities for closer collaboration in research, computational technologies, and support for young researchers.
Nová éra spolupráce v slovenskom HPC: Začíname budovať HPC ekosysém spolu s Eviden13 Jun-V slovenskom HPC ekosystéme sa začína nové, mimoriadne zaujímavé obdobie. Ako ste už určite zachytili, Slovenská akadémia vied realizuje projekt s názvom „Budovanie superpočítača pre Národné superpočítačové centrum“, ktorý prinesie novú výpočtovú infraštruktúru pre potreby vedy, výskumu, inovácií aj verejných služieb. Ako Národné superpočítačové centrum sme radi, že môžeme byť pri tom – a stáť pri zrode spolupráce, ktorá má potenciál významne ovplyvniť ďalší rozvoj tejto oblasti na Slovensku. Hovoríme o začiatku partnerstva medzi Národným superpočítačovým centrom a spoločnosťou Atos Eviden, ktorá tento stroj dodáva.
NSCC a NCC pre HPC na veľtrhu Portugal Smart Cities Summit 2025 12 Jun-Ako budú vyzerať mestá budúcnosti? Aké technológie ich premenia na inteligentné, udržateľné a inkluzívne prostredia pre život a prácu? Aj o tom sa hovorilo na Portugal Smart Cities Summit, jednom z najväčších veľtrhov zameraných na smart technológie, ktorý sa konal od 3. do 5. júna 2025 v Lisabone.
Meaningful Collaboration: The National Supercomputing Centre and TUKE Explore Common Ground 16 Jun - Lucia Malíčková, Project Coordinator at the National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC Slovakia) and the National Competence Centre for High-Performance Computing (NCC for HPC), met with Associate Professor Maroš Halama, PhD, from the Faculty of Materials, Metallurgy and Recycling at the Technical University of Košice. Their discussion focused on opportunities for closer collaboration in research, computational technologies, and support for young researchers.
Nová éra spolupráce v slovenskom HPC: Začíname budovať HPC ekosysém spolu s Eviden 13 Jun - V slovenskom HPC ekosystéme sa začína nové, mimoriadne zaujímavé obdobie. Ako ste už určite zachytili, Slovenská akadémia vied realizuje projekt s názvom „Budovanie superpočítača pre Národné superpočítačové centrum“, ktorý prinesie novú výpočtovú infraštruktúru pre potreby vedy, výskumu, inovácií aj verejných služieb. Ako Národné superpočítačové centrum sme radi, že môžeme byť pri tom – a stáť pri zrode spolupráce, ktorá má potenciál významne ovplyvniť ďalší rozvoj tejto oblasti na Slovensku. Hovoríme o začiatku partnerstva medzi Národným superpočítačovým centrom a spoločnosťou Atos Eviden, ktorá tento stroj dodáva.
NSCC a NCC pre HPC na veľtrhu Portugal Smart Cities Summit 2025 12 Jun - Ako budú vyzerať mestá budúcnosti? Aké technológie ich premenia na inteligentné, udržateľné a inkluzívne prostredia pre život a prácu? Aj o tom sa hovorilo na Portugal Smart Cities Summit, jednom z najväčších veľtrhov zameraných na smart technológie, ktorý sa konal od 3. do 5. júna 2025 v Lisabone. 
