Category: General

International Women's Day is celebrated in many countries around the world. IWD is a day when women are recognized for their achievements without regard to divisions, whether national, ethnic, linguistic, cultural, economic or political. This day is a manifestation of solidarity between women and a reminder of the effort to equalize women and at the same time the longest revolution in our history.

In 1910, a second International Conference of Working Women second International Conference of Working Women was held in Copenhagen. A woman named Clara Zetkin (Leader of the 'Women's Office' for the Social Democratic Party in Germany) tabled the idea of an International Women's Day. She proposed that every year there should be a celebration on the same day in every country – an International Women's Day – to press for their demands. The suggestion received unanimous approval and thus International Women's Day was instituted.

The following year on March 19th, 1911, International Women's Day (IWD) was marked for the first time, by over a million people in Austria-Hungary, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland. In addition to the requirements for better working conditions, the right to vote, equal pay, etc. were also demanded. Since 1975, we have commemorated the IWD as a day of international solidarity of all women striving to achieve equality, justice, peace and development.

And what about IWD in Slovakia? The first IWD national holiday in Czechoslovakia took place in 1921 and a year later IWD acquired a mass character. During the Second World War IWD was abolished and subsequently renewed after 1945.

Women and IT

Women in the STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), including information and communication technologies (ICT) are significantly under-represented.

  „IT sektor trpí globálnym chronickým nedostatkom IKT špecialistov. Ženy sú podreprezentované na všetkých stupňoch digitálneho sektora v Európe. Hoci práve digitálny sektor sa rapídne rozrastá a tvorí stovky tisícov nových pracovných miest každý rok, pomer žien v tomto sektore klesá. Napriek dopytu po IKT zručnostiach a rastúcej nezamestnanosti sa predpokladá, že EÚ bude trpieť nedostatkom digitálnych zručností už od roku 2020. 52% populácie EÚ sú ženy, avšak reprezentujú len 17% zo všetkých IKT špecialistov a zarábajú o 19% menej v porovnaní s mužmi pracujúcich na rovnakých pozíciach. S 13.7% zastúpením žien v tejto oblasti je Slovensko pod priemerom EÚ.“ According to he Ministry of Investments, Regional development and Informatization of the Slovak republic the IT sector is suffering from a global chronic shortage of ICT specialists. Women are under-represented at all levels of the digital sector in Europe. Despite the fact that the digital sector is growing rapidly, creating incrementally thousands of new jobs each year, the proportion of women in this sector is declining. Although there is a demand for ICT skills as well as rising unemployment, the EU is expected to suffer from a digital skills shortage by 2020. 52% of the EU population are women, but they represent only 17% of all ICT specialists and earn 19% less than men for the same work. In Slovakia, women only represent 13.7% of all ICT specialist, placing our country below the EU average.

According to the study of the European Commission  Women in the Digital Age the annual productivity loss for the European economy of women leaving their digital jobs to become inactive is calculated to be about 16.2 billion EUR.

The international project PRACE, in which Slovakia is represented by the Centre of Operations of the Slovak Academy of Sciences and which covers many of the HPC activities in Europe, brought attention to the examples of successful women working in this field in the Women in HPC publication. This publication is focuses on progress in the field of HPC and also on successful women in HPC sector. The number of women working in HPC is growing day by day, said Dr Sylvie Joussaume, the Chair of the PRACE Scientific Steering Committee.

In Slovakia, the AjTyvIT&nbsporganization contributes to improving the balance of women in the IT fields by organizing educational events and courses for girls and women.

An IT community portal - robimeit.sk – publishes interviews with women in IT, bringing inspirational stories to the audience.

The National Competence Centre for HPC in Slovakia we follow the equal opportunity standards and adhere strictly to the anti-discrimination principles. We hope to join in the effort to increase the number of women studying or working in the IT field in our activities during the following year.

UN Women announces the theme for International Women’s Day, March8th, 2021 (IWD 2021) as, “Women in leadership: Achieving an equal future in a COVID-19 world.” On this occasion, the National Competence Center for HPC in Slovakia would like to extend the best wishes to all women and men to find the courage to challenge and lead our society to a positive change.

The idea that drives the POP CoE (Performance Optimisation and Productivity Centre of Excellence in HPC) is a simple one: to boost productivity of EU research and industry by providing free of charge services that help improve performance of high performance computing (HPC) and parallel software. The aim of POP is to offer our world-class HPC competence to organisations that want to understand software performance issues and to adopt parallel programming best practice.

Main services of the POP CoE are: Performance Audits, Improvement Plans, Proof-of-Concept demos, and Training.

• Performance Audits are an initial analysis measuring a range of performance metrics to assess quality of performance and identify the issues affecting performance.
• Improvement Plans undertake further performance evaluations to qualify and quantify solutions and estimate potential improvements.
• Proof of Concept work uses extracted application kernels to demonstrate actual benefits from tuning and optimisation.
• Training offers events and materials covering parallel profiling tools, programming models and parallelisation approaches.

Services are free of charge to organisations, SMEs, ISVs, companies in the EU!

 Services of POP CoE are provided for:

• Code developers. (Assessment of detailed actual behavior, suggestion of most productive directions to refactor code…)
• Users. (Assessment of achieved performance in specific production conditions, possible improvements modifying environment setup, evidence to interact with code provider...)
• Infrastructure operators. (Assessment of achieved performance in production conditions, possible improvements from modifying environment setup, information for time computer time allocation processes, training of support staff...)
• Vendors. (Benchmarking, customer support, system dimensioning/design...)

In his presentation, L. Demovič introduced the scope and goals of the EuroCC project and underlined the importance of HPC in many areas, such as innovations, digitalization and transformation of industry. The National competence centre for HPC provides services for SMEs, industry, public and academic sector and enables them to utilize HPC, AI HPDA and ML tools in their business or research.

The newly founded National supercomputing centre (NSCC) was established in 2020 as a consortium of the Centre of Operations SAS, the Ministry of Investments, Regional Development and Informatization of the Slovak Republic and the I4DI organization. The NSCC is expected to cooperate closely with the NCC for HPC.

The importance and role of the basic and applied research in the transformation of industry was debated by L. Demovič during a discussion panel together with other participants, including the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Economy of the Slovak Republic, Richard Sulík.

We are convinced that the EuroCC project will play a key role in overcoming barriers in introducing HPC/HPDA/AI solutions during the informatization and digitalization process and will increase the competence level in these areas in Slovakia significantly.

Reportage about NSCC

More info about the EuroCC project

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The National Supercomputing Center was established as a consortium of the Centre of Operations of the Slovak Academy of Sciences (COO SAS), the Ministry of Investment, Regional Development and Informatization SR (MIRRI) and the I4DI (Innovations for Digital Infrastructure) association, whose members are Tachyum, Towercom and PosAm. During the first two years of the NSCC's activities, Lukáš Demovič, Director of COO SAS, will be the Chairman of the Board of Trustees, and Radoslav Repa, General Director of the MIRRI Digital Agenda Section, will become the Vice-Chairman of the Board of Trustees.

The vision of the National Supercomputing Center project as an association of state institutions and the private sector is, among other things, to build a new supercomputer in Slovakia, which would be at a competitive performance level in Europe and allow more extensive and efficient use of HPC technologies and utilization of high-performance data analytics tools. artificial intelligence and machine learning by Slovak users. The NSCC, in cooperation with the National Competence Center for HPC, will participate in increasing competencies in these areas, in particular by providing free consultations and educational activities for small and medium-sized enterprises, industrial companies, government entities and, last but not least, academic institutions.

„Cieleným rozvojom HPC infraštruktúry a jej sprístupnením, zvyšovaním kompetencií, poskytovaním služieb a v neposlednom rade podporou národných projektov činnosť NSCC bezpochyby prispeje k zlepšeniu konkurencieschopnosti Slovenska nielen v oblasti inovácií,” povedal predseda správnej rady NSCC Lukáš Demovič.

The NSCC will be actively involved in European projects and international grant calls. It is expected that in the future it will represent Slovakia in European projects such as PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe) or EuroHPC (European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking).

The EU Agency for Cybersecurity coordinates the organisation of the ECSM campaign by acting as a “hub” for all participating Member States and EU Institutions, and by providing expert suggestions, generating synergies and promoting common messaging among EU citizens, businesses and public administration. The Agency also publishes new materials and provides expert advice on different cybersecurity topics for Member States’ audiences.

The main objectives of the European CyberSecMonth are the following:

• Raise security awareness among a wide spectrum of addressees as defined in the EU Cyber Security Strategy.
• Spread awareness about NIS Directive and its importance.
• Promote rules of safer use of the Internet for all users.
• Involve all important entities in raising security awareness.
• Increase a media interest in raising security awareness across and outside Europe as well.
• Enhance interest in cyber security topic through political and media coordination.

Hlavným odkazom ECSM je: The motto of the campaign is: Cyber Security is a Shared Responsibility!

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More informantion about ECSM  

EU Cyber Security Strategy