IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center (https://www.it4i.cz), a university institute at VSB – Technical University of Ostrava, assures the operationality of the most powerful supercomputing technology in the Czech Republic. With respect to its uniqueness and significance, it ranks highest among large national research infrastructures of the Czech Republic. It is currently operating two powerful supercomputers – Anselm and Salomon, the latter of which still ranks among the top European supercomputers. At the beginning of the year 2019, a new system with an approximate theoretical peak performance of 800 Tflop/s is planned to support our current supercomputers. This new system is to be equipped with the latest available technology including processors with the AVX-512 instruction set, Nvidia Tesla V100 accelerators, a fat compute node with a memory of up to 6 TB, 200 Gb/s interconnect, NVMe memory-based storage, and BurstBuffer technology for accelerating data access.
IT4Innovations is also a research and development centre with strong international links and as such, it is currently involved in good number of international projects funded primarily by the Horizon 2020 programme. Since its foundation in 2011, IT4Innovations has been a member of the prestigious pan-European PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe) research infrastructure, where it represents the Czech Republic. Since 2016, it has also been involved in the European Technology Platform for High-Performance Computing (ETP4HPC), which focuses on defining technology and research priorities in the field of high-performance computing in Europe. Since the beginning of the year 2018, IT4Innovations has also been participating in the preparation of the EuroHPC joint undertaking.
Its activities are also focused on supporting the deployment of computationally intensive numerical simulations and advanced data analysis primarily in small and medium-sized enterprises. IT4Innovations is registered by the European Commission as a Digital Innovation Hub in the fields of HPC, artificial intelligence, and advanced data analysis, see http://s3platform.jrc.ec.europa.eu. Moreover, we have become an important centre for education in HPC. We are proud to be one of the PRACE Training Centres, offering a comprehensive training programme. We have also established a brand new Computational Sciences PhD study programme.
Within the POP project the IT4I team is mainly involved in Performance Assessment and Proof of Concept services where it brings the experience in development, performance analysis, and optimization of the HPC applications achieved from EXA2CT (H2020: Exascale Algorithms and Advanced Computational Techniques) and IPCC (Intel Parallel Computing Center) projects. For the new Co-design activity, IT4I will participate in kernel extraction and definition. IT4I will also carry out promotion activities to find out potential users for the services, especially in the central and eastern part of Europe in both academic and industrial environments. Finally, IT4I will participate in POP Dissemination and Training activities using its experience in organizing various training events and workshops.