Author: Halyna Hyryavets

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

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

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

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

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

Survey

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

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

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

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

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

Agenda will be available soon!

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

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

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

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

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

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

HERCULES – weather forecast for drone operation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This two-day event will include in-depths training on the flagship EoCoE codes and solvers, which focus on HPC simulations applied to energy domains, are designed and optimized to run on the latest iteration of European pre-exascale machines, and will ultimately be scaled to the upcoming exascale systems. It will allow you to test your mastery of these codes on the EoCoE Software as a Service Portal, using the computing resources of the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center (PSNC).

Team of brilliant researchers, from several prominent European research centers, will host the training sessions and supervise your work.

A strong participation to the EoCoE school will be rewarded with several awards, including money prize, books, full expenses for three-day trips to Naples to join our project’s members for our final consortium meeting in Naples at the end of June, for up to six participants.

This school is a unique opportunity for participants to meet with leading researchers and experts, to try their hand at top domain codes, and to develop their network. We hope many of you will join us for this milestone event, which will conclude the second phase of the EoCoE project with a bang!

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Confidential computing is a very topical issue that is gaining in importance with the growing popularity of cloud services, and this aspect is also important in the provision of HPC (High-Performance Computing) services. These tools and techniques help providers ensure the security of client data during their processing.

Competitors' role as "service providers" was to design and train an appropriate deep neural network (DNN) and / or gradient-boosted decision tree (GBDT) model on the data set provided. The condition was that any end user - the client - could use this model to process their data without the provider being able to decode / decrypt it.

More information about the challenge that hackers could work on can be found here.

During the hackathon, participants also had the opportunity to participate in a workshop on high-performance computing, where one of our lecturers explained how high-performance computing works, what are the areas of use and what are the possibilities of access to HPC infrastructure in Slovakia.

The team from the Spacecode Technical University in Košice won the award for the solution design - congratulations! 

Aftermovie

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eINFRA and experience from the Czech Republic

Experts from CESNETwere invited to share their experiences with both NCCs in this area. CESNET is an association of universities of the Czech Republic and the Czech Academy of Sciences. It operates and develops the national e-infrastructure for science, research and education which encompasses a computer network, computational grids, data storage and collaborative environment. During the workshop, representatives of the CESNET presented such topics as:

M. Ruda: Introduction, CESNET and Metacentrum: large-scale distributed computing infrastructure and services.

D. Antoš: CESNET and Metacentrum: operation and development of data storage as a part of the national infrastructure for science and research.

Cloud services as an (un)necessary part of the HPC provider portfolio – is it profitable?

Branislav Jansík from IT4Innovations and the head of the Czech competence center Tomáš Karásek presented the requirements of users for access to cloud services. It is the motivation, requirements and expectations of users, as well as the benefits and barriers from the point of view of the HPC service provider, have been the subject of a longer discussion. Participants also debated alternative platforms, "easy-access" services, microservice, HPC "market".

Both National Competence Centers plan to integrate HPC cloud services into their portfolios using the open-source platforms OpenNebula and OpenStack. CESNET representatives who have experience with both tools shared their benefits and technical support options.

The more general debate concerned in particular the issue of systematic and long-term support for the development and operation of HPC systems as a necessary component of the national research infrastructure.

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