NEWS

In mid-April, Michal Otyepka took up the position of the Head of the Modelling for Nanotechnologies Lab at IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Centre. He will lead the teams focusing on the design of new materials, the development of special surfaces for nanooptics, and modelling and design of nanocomposites, boasting state-of-the-art equipment following the latest trends.

IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center conducts excellent research via national and international projects.  Quite unique is the success rate in being involved in projects in the European Union's Horizon 2020 Framework Programme for Research and Innovation, where IT4Innovations currently features in 16 international projects, in one of which as the coordinator.

The 23nd PRACE Call for Proposals for Project Access is open till April 27, 2021. The allocation of awarded resources on Tier-0 systems is made for 1 year at a time with its utilization starting on October 1, 2021.

Applicants can apply for a 12-month plan (Single-year Project) or a 24 or 36-month plan (Multi-year Project).

The DICE Calls for Service Requests aim to encourage European researchers to take advantage of a set of digital storage services being made available free of charge by the European Commission. The offering includes a broad spectrum of services ranging from the familiar “personal drive storage” for individuals and small teams up to extremely sophisticated value-added facilities for long-term preservation, identification, metadata curation, and implementation of FAIR principles for data-intensive research projects. In addition, the DICE project has defined a simple and efficient process to minimize the time to service acquisition, reducing it in some cases to days.

At the end of last year, IT4Innovations launched the Visualization and Virtual Reality Lab (VVR Lab), which will support the supercomputing infrastructure, and is to be used to visualize 3D content using the latest available technology in large-scale 3D projection and virtual reality devices. Among other roles, the lab will support in-house research carried out at IT4Innovations and at VSB - Technical University of Ostrava.

Find out what happened at IT4Innovations in the 4th quarter of 2020. You can find the new Newsletter HERE.

After seven years, the Anselm supercomputer is leaving IT4Innovations. During its operation, its computational resources were available to Czech as well as foreign scientists, and more than 2.6 million computing jobs were run on it within 725 research projects in fields such as material sciences, computational chemistry, biosciences, and engineering. It will find its further application as part of the World of Civilization exhibition installed in the Dolní Vítkovice area.

Anselm, thank you for all your years of service and now you go and enjoy your hard-earned retirement in Dolní Vítkovice.

Institutions can apply for computational resources within Open Access Grant Competitions. The grant competition is announced 3 times a year (February, June, October) for employees of research, scientific and educational organizations.

Vít Vondrák, the current Managing Director of IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center, has been reappointed to his post for another term. This will be of the same length as the previous one, i.e. for 3 years. In this interview we discuss what he achieved in his first term as the IT4Innovations Managing Director, and what plans he has for his next term.

In early 2020, the Digital Innovation Hub Ostrava (DIH Ostrava) was established, bringing together the activities of IT4In - novations and MSIC Ostrava, enabling small and medium-sized enterprises to examine and potentially address their digitalisation needs. These, unlike large companies, tend not to have the financial or human resources to commit to verifying and potentially deploying digital technologies. For this reason, the Moravian-Silesian Region also decided to support the foundation of DIH Ostrava, including a pilot financial advantage tool for selected types of services and access to supercomputing capacities.

IT4Innovations cooperates with the ENET centre, which is part of VSB – Technical University of Ostrava, in the Centre for Energy and Environmental Technologies (CEET) project. The project is supported by the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic, which financially supports research and innovation.

In December, the installation of our new petascale supercomputer with the working name EURO_IT4I, has started. The supercomputer will be put into operation during the first half of this year. You can watch the progress of the installation in the photo gallery.

Jiří Dědeček together with Edyta Tabor and Štěpán Sklenák from J. Heyrovský Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Czech Academy of sciences found a unique way to turn methane into methanol, for which they received the Czech Head Invention Award. Using the IT4Innovations supercomputers in their research, they computationally predicted results, which they eventually confirmed experimentally. They received 32,458,000 core hours of IT4Innovations computational resources for their research within six Open Access Grant Competitions.

Find out what happened at IT4Innovations in the 3rd quarter of 2020. You can find the new Newsletter HERE.

Institutions can apply for computational resources within Open Access Grant Competitions. The grant competition is announced 3 times a year (February, June, October) for employees of research, scientific and educational organizations.

The allocation commission divided 74,498,000 core hours among 73 projects within the 20th Open Access Grant Competition. See the detailed results HERE.

It is no exaggeration to say that the year 2019 will surely rank among those very significant and successful years in our center‘s history. Success was achieved in the field of research, supercomputing infrastructure development, cooperation with industry, and education, all of which are the main pillars of our activity. I am particularly pleased to share our achievements with you on the pages of our 2019 Review.

The 22nd PRACE Call for Proposals for Project Access is open till October 27, 2021. The allocation of awarded resources on Tier-0 systems is made for 1 year at a time with its utilization starting on April 1, 2021.

Applicants can apply for a 12-month plan (Single-year Project) or a 24 or 36-month plan (Multi-year Project).

Read the article "Photoelectron spectra of alkali metal – ammonia microjets: From blue electrolyte to bronze metal" by our user Pavel Jungwirth from IOCB Prague. Pavel Jungwirth's team gained 650.000 core hours for its research. You can find more information about the research here.