MetaCentrum, operated by the CESNET association, has significantly expanded and modernized its computing infrastructure by 8,423 CPU cores.
CESNET integrates computing clusters of academic institutions across the Czech academic community. At the same time, it is the dominant owner of resources. It offers its own 15,000 CPUs to a wide academic and research community in the Czech Republic. The total integrated computing capacity is 38,000 CPU cores.
The new computer clusters are located at the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen, the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences (CAS) and as part of the participation in the ELIXIR CZ project in the research institutions BIOCEV and Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the CAS. "The construction of new servers for demanding tasks and the strengthening of existing capacities is primarily intended for demanding tasks of a proteomic nature and chemical biology. Part of the capacity is aimed at supporting database environments for a wide community of users, "said Jiří Vondrášek, associate professor at the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.
Computing performance is distributed throughout the Czech Republic, within reach of user groups. It serves a wide range of disciplines, such as natural and physical sciences, pharmacy, bioinformatics, genomics, biology, medicine, computer science and computer engineering. The involvement of new computational resources will reduce data processing times for experts in the mentioned fields, reduce waiting queues and expand the range of possible calculations.
Thanks to MetaCentrum, computing performance is connected into a unified environment, which enables more efficient use of existing state-of-the-art equipment and access to a wide range of licenses and tools. The services of MetaCentrum also include appropriate support for both scientific workflows and tools such as JupyterNotebook, JupyterHub, Hadoop or Sparc for processing large data.
In 2020, MetaCentrum was used by 2225 users. Last year, they calculated a total of 16,630 CPU years in more than 13 million computational tasks. Thanks to the MetaCentrum environment, 236 publications registered in the Web of science were created last year.
Computational resources are also integrated into the international research area. These include the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) environment. Part of the new performance will also be directed for use within the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) initiative, for which CESNET is appointed national coordinator.
"CESNET strives to continuously improve the technological background and IT environment for the academic community in the Czech Republic, to gradually change and modernize technologies and to ensure sufficient capacities for research, development and education," emphasized the director of the association Ing. Jan Gruntorád, CSc.
Scientists, researchers and academics can join MetaCentrum's computing resources. The necessary information and support are available at https://www.metacentrum.cz/.
The increase in CESNET computing capacity was financed from the e-INFRA CZ Project: Modernization (Program: EF - Operational Program Research, Development, Education, Identification Number: CZ.02.1.01 / 0.0 / 0.0 / 18_072 / 00159) and from the ELIXIR-CZ Project (LM-Large research infrastructure projects, identification number LM2018131).
