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The second edition of the AI Days event titled Four Weeks, Four Cities & Artificial Intelligence will also take place in Ostrava for the first time, from 23-29 October. This year, the National Competence Centre in HPC (NCC) is taking part as well.

The AI Days were held for the first time in Brno last year, and this year, the event will also take place in Prague, Pilsen, and Ostrava. And it is the Ostrava part that the NCC will participate in – on Tuesday, 24 October, in the conference rooms of the Moravian-Silesian Innovation Centre. Are you interested in the possibilities of using supercomputers not only in the field of artificial intelligence? What are the currently implemented projects, and how to establish cooperation? Tomáš Karásek, the NCC coordinator in the Czech Republic, will be happy to answer these and other questions on the spot.

The AI Days will offer lectures, workshops, presentations, and an interesting accompanying programme. The event’s focal point is the introduction of artificial intelligence in relation to current events and the development of this technology. The AI Days are intended not only for those interested in industry, public administration, and academia but also for the general public. In other words, for all those interested not only in AI itself but particularly in its use across fields of human activity and in different contexts.

The night when science and scientists show you their true colours. The Researcher’s Night, this year entitled Mystery, will take place on Friday, 6 October. At our booth, we have prepared an interesting programme for both children and adults. For all of you, it will be an opportunity not only to learn about supercomputers but also to take home one of the nice prizes if you are successful.

As usual, you can find us at the IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center in Ostrava.

The Researcher’s Night has been held in the Czech Republic since 2005, with universities, research centres, and many other institutions participating. Currently, the event takes place under the national coordination of the University of Ostrava and VSB – Technical University of Ostrava.

Prosthetic aids have long been a significant help to disabled people, but their manufacturing presents several pitfalls.

This was one of the outcomes of the half-day workshop of the National Competence Centres in HPC (NCC), which was held on 12th June and immediately preceded the 9th annual Austrian-Slovenian HPC Meeting.

What else was discussed at the meeting, including representatives from the Czech Republic? The discussion on key topics such as deepening cooperation with small and medium-sized enterprises and creating and effectively presenting a portfolio of services was supported by model presentations of success stories examples. These confirmed, among other things, the need for mutual synergy of individual NCCs as well as the importance of their cooperation within other projects (e.g., European Digital Innovation Hubs) and cooperation with industrial companies.

The 9th Austrian-Slovenian HPC Meeting (ASHPC 2023) was held in Maribor, Slovenia, on 13–15 June. The programme also included a presentation titled “NCC Czech Republic, Entrance to the World of HPC” by Tomáš Karásek, the Czech NCC Coordinator.

The three-day event brought several exciting contributions. National institutions and scientific clusters presented their latest work, and news from the world of exascale and cloud computing was also discussed. Subsequently resonating in the discussions, one central topic was quantum computing, its potential, development, and integration into the high-performance computing environment. The conference also featured a poster session.

The ASHPC Meeting traces its roots back to 2015. The original modest event focused exclusively on HPC issues in Austria, with an overlap to the German-speaking countries, has grown over time, and the last three editions are now fully dedicated to current topics in the Central European region and the Balkan countries. For a change, the Jubilee 10th edition will be held in Austria next year.

The most significant science popularisation event in the Czech Republic, the Science Fair, has already passed. This year’s seventh edition, traditionally held at the PVO EXPO Praha exhibition centre in Letňany in Prague (8th – 10th June), broke not only records in the number of visitors. Indeed, we couldn’t miss out on it.

Throughout the event, there was great interest in visiting our booth, Unlock the Secrets of Supercomputers. What is a supercomputer? What does it consist of? What can be calculated on it? What is its main advantage? These are just some of the visitors’ inquisitive questions during the three days. They also took part in a virtual reality experience, in which they moved to our data room, and many had a spin on the wheel of fortune, where knowledge and attention also played an important role. Finally, an easy supercomputer quiz with Harry Potter was a huge success among the children.

So, what was the deal with the records? The first one was broken at the very beginning of the event, with 100 exhibitors registering. Another record was broken when the organisers counted 46,000 visitors, 11,000 more than last year. This year’s Science Fair was indeed worth it!

The Science Fair is the most significant science popularisation and educational event in the Czech Republic, organised by the Czech Academy of Sciences since 2015. This year it was held for the seventh time (two editions were cancelled due to the Covid pandemic)

Europe’s most important event in high-performance computing, ISC 2023, is already over. The National Competence Centre in HPC (NCC) presented its achievements so far, including successful collaborations with companies and other stakeholders in the field, and introduced the conference participants to current opportunities for collaboration with industry, public administration, and academia.

Lectures, panel discussions, and project presentations. Over five hundred representatives from the field of HPC attended the EuroHPC Summit in Göteborg, Sweden (20-23 March). On the last day of the event, a workshop of Centres of Excellence and National Competence Centres (NCCs) was held, where the coordinator of the Czech NCC, Tomáš Karásek from IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center, was also present.

In addition to presentations of selected centres, success stories were also discussed (see examples of NCC Czech Republic here). Discussions included, among others, the need for more intensive cooperation with partners from the industry, raising awareness of the services of competence centres, and issues affecting high-performance computing. One of the crucial topics for the future that was discussed was the improvement of accessibility for users and the consequent need for better clarity and communication of available services. The need to address the reduction of energy consumption in the operation of the centres was also mentioned.

The EuroHPC Summit is one of the most important conferences in the field of high-performance computing. It has been held annually since 2016, and this year, for the first time, the main organiser was the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU).

A photo gallery from the meeting can be found HERE.

The National Competence Centre for HPC celebrates two years of existence in the Czech Republic. During this time, it has helped many companies and public institutions by providing access to supercomputers, technology consulting, and free educational activities. It intends to build on its earlier achievements in the next three-year period of its operation.

Leveraging the power of high-performance computing can be a potent avenue for future growth for many companies and institutions, Recent years have proven very challenging, with companies having to deal with fundamental problems that include profound societal changes, the coronavirus pandemic and its related restrictions, the dramatic increase in the prices of materials and energy, and changes in customer-supplier relationships. Many companies are dealing both with the need to innovate production processes and the creation of the products themselves, and the financial complexity of the implementation itself; a secondary difficulty is the lack of qualified human resources. National HPC Competence Centres funded by the EuroHPC joint European venture, more than thirty of which have sprung up in Europe over the past two years, can be of considerable value in this context.

In the Czech Republic, the role of the National Competence Centre for HPC (NCC) is played by the IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center at VSB – Technical University of Ostrava. “Our goal is primarily to offer a wide portfolio of services in the field of HPC, as well as to promote cooperation at a pan-European level, to strengthen Czech companies’ technological independence and competitiveness,” explained Tomáš Karásek, who manages the NCC in the Czech Republic. In practice, adopting high-performance computing can result in financial and time savings for many companies and institutions when tackling specific tasks. “Every year, we prepare more than a dozen courses that we offer free of charge to interested companies, public institutions, and academia” added Tomáš Karásek.

In addition to consulting services, designing and implementing pilot HPC solutions, and migrating existing ones, end users can use services that include information sharing and, last but not least, the possibility of professional training.

The fact that there is much to build on from the previous period is demonstrated by several use cases implemented by the Czech National Competence Centre for HPC. These include cooperation with the Police of the Czech Republic (development of a tool for more effective crime fighting), processing of medical images as a service for University Hospital Ostrava, launching a vaccination centre in Ostrava, processing and storage of data for the European Space Agency, and many other projects for industrial companies and public institutions.