Category: General

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."

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.

More information about summer school

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

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!

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

• Superheroes 4 science webpage
• Superheroes 4 science facebook
• Superheroes 4 sicence instagram
• Superheroes 4 science youtube

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.

More information

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.

Speakers Martin Tamajka – Lead Research engineer ( Kempelen Institute of Intelligent Technologies) and Ján Čegiň – PhD student ( Kempelen Institute of Intelligent Technologies)
Date: 13. December; 16:00 CET
Venue: online via zoom
Registration

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.

The call is open for all countries affiliated with EuroCC.
More info about EuroCC Supercomputing Accelerator.

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.

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.