A building of the National Supercomputing Center has opened in Ostrava

OSA projekt s.r.o.: IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center (2013-14)

Ostrava - The building of the National Supercomputing Center IT4Innovations was opened today at the campus of the VŠB - Technical University of Ostrava (VŠB-TUO). In a building costing nearly 200 million crowns, a supercomputer will operate from next year, which is expected to be one of the hundred most powerful in the world. The total cost of the National Supercomputing Center project, which is to be fully completed by 2015, will exceed 2.4 billion crowns.
    "This is a key milestone," said VŠB-TUO Rector Ivo Vondrák. Installation of the necessary technologies, such as cooling or securing energy sources, will now begin in the building in order to install the supercomputer itself.
    At the beginning of next year, the so-called small cluster, the supercomputer Anselm, which has been operating in containers outside the center's building since May last year, is expected to move into the building. It will then be followed by the large cluster, the main supercomputer, which, if everything goes well, is expected to start operating in the third quarter of 2015.
    "The supercomputer Anselm is used not only by our research teams but genuinely by the entire Czech scientific community and the commercial sector. Among that scientific community, these are truly the top Czech scientists," said the director of the supercomputing center, Martin Palkovič. Anselm’s performance is comparable to that of 3,900 standard laptops.
    Vondrák stated that the performance of the main supercomputer could be compared to that of about 74,000 laptops. According to him, the supercomputer is essentially a large laboratory of a universal nature where all experiments are conducted on mathematical models. "Here you can solve a whole range of problems from physical to chemical, biochemical. We calculate the designs of various drugs here, which people from the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry in Prague try to design and verify," said the rector.
    The supercomputer is also used to solve problems in transportation. "Today, we evaluate 130,000 cars and their positions on the roads in the Czech Republic every half minute, and based on that, we provide information to the National Transport Information Center, which then tells the radio: you will wait five minutes, ten minutes," the rector described. Thanks to computer calculations, it is possible to optimize traffic flow.
    "There are a whole range of tasks in the fields of aerodynamics, fluid flow, and gases. All these tasks are solved today on supercomputers, and what is interesting is that you can combine these things together," Vondrák said.
    According to him, Ostrava is becoming part of a network of the largest supercomputing centers, of which there are approximately 20 in Europe, including in Barcelona, Stuttgart, or Edinburgh. Deputy Prime Minister Pavel Bělobrádek (KDU-ČSL) stated that the establishment of the National Supercomputing Center is significant not only for Ostrava and the Moravian-Silesian region but for the whole republic.
    Currently, the Ostrava supercomputer already employs 190 of the planned 200 people. "Just under ten percent are foreigners, and many people are returning from abroad, from Singapore, Denmark, Belgium," Vondrák said. According to him, experts are returning mainly because Ostrava now has something that is not available even in those mentioned countries.
    The building opened today has more than 9,200 m² of usable space and, apart from the data hall for the supercomputer, includes office spaces. After the supercomputer is operational, the building will be partially heated by the heat generated by the computer itself.