15. January 2021
Prague, January 11th, 2021. The national e-infrastructure for science and research e-INFRA CZ plans to substantially increase its parameters. The CESNET backbone network will be upgraded to a transmission speed of 400 Gb/s, which is four times the current value. At the same time, the access infrastructure with 100 Gb/s ports will be expanded, which is designed for the primary connection of organizations and for the deployment of special devices or applications.
e-INFRA CZ also counts on continuous renewal and expansion of computing capacities, which includes computing clusters, storage capacity or computing graphics cards. In addition, it will continuously increase the user capacity of its data storage, from the current approximately 32 PB to the expected 60 PB in 2023.
In the future, within the international EuroHPC initiative, the most powerful supercomputer in the Czech Republic and one of the most powerful in Europe will become part of e-INFRA CZ. It will be put into operation this year at the IT4Innovations National Supercomputer Center in Ostrava.
“All these steps will be appreciated by scientists and researchers from a number of fields who need adequate network and technological background for their work and to participate in the most demanding international projects,” says Jan Gruntorád, director of the CESNET Association.
e-INFRA CZ consists of three infrastructures: CESNET, CERIT-SC and IT4Innovations. It includes a high-performance national communication infrastructure, a national grid and cloud infrastructure, state-of-the-art supercomputing systems and large-capacity data storage. It provides comprehensive capacity and resources for the transmission, storage and processing of scientific data to all R&D entities, regardless of the industry in which they operate. It offers them a comprehensive portfolio of ICT services, without which today’s top research and development cannot be realized.
The most advanced e-infrastructures are used, for example, in the development of new drugs, in personalized medicine, in materials research and nanotechnology, in research in the field of safety or environmental care, in the development of new energy sources or intelligent transport systems and in the implementation of Smart City concepts and Industry 4.0.
In addition to details about the planned upgrade, e-INFRA CZ also presented its new logo and at the same time launched a new website, on which it will publish not only information about its services, but also about demanding scientific or research projects in the implementation of which it participates. The intention is to create a unified information platform for the scientific and research community from the website www.e-infra.cz.
A description of all e-INFRA CZ services is now available on the website, which include sophisticated network services, computing, data storage, services in the field of cybersecurity, network identity or user cooperation.
Project for the creation of a modernized national large research e-infrastructure e-INFRA CZ
EF18_072/0015659 – E-INFRA CZ: Modernization(2020-2022, MSM/EF) is co-financed by the European Union.
CESNET is an association of universities and the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. It operates and develops the Czech national e-infrastructure designed for the needs of science, research, development and education. It provides a wide range of services for data transmission, storage and processing. These include powerful computing clusters, large data storage for data sharing, multimedia communication tools, and distributed team collaboration environments. The main attention is paid to secure communication, data protection and gradual modernization of the e-infrastructure through the results of own research. CESNET is part of the pan-European GÉANT backbone network and the EGI grid infrastructure. More information: www.cesnet.cz
CERIT-SC (CERIT Scientific Cloud) is a national centre that runs computing and data infrastructure for research and development. With a computing power of over 6,000 CPU cores and 10 PB of storage, it is an important node in the MetaCentrum computing infrastructure. Aside from utilising its own resources, CERIT-SC also conducts research activities that cover e-infrastructure development and interdisciplinary research and development with research partners from various scientific disciplines, where it primarily contributes its experience in the areas of HPC, data analysis, artificial intelligence, bioinformatics and LifeScience. CERIT-SC contributes to a number of international infrastructure and research projects (ELIXIR, numerous EOSC projects, EDIReX, CETOCOEN Excellence, …).
CERIT-SC is part of the Institute of Computer Science of Masaryk University.
More information: https://www.cerit-sc.cz/
IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center is a leading research, development, and innovation centre active in the field of high-performance computing (HPC) and data analysis (HPDA). IT4Innovations operates the most powerful supercomputing systems in the Czech Republic, which are provided to Czech and foreign research teams from both academia and industry. IT4Innovations currently operates four supercomputers, to which a brand new petascal system with computing power approximately 15.2 PFlop/s will be added in 2021. The key research areas of IT4Innovations include big data processing and analysis, machine learning, development of parallel scalable algorithms, solution of computationally demanding engineering problems, advanced visualization, virtual reality, modelling for nanotechnologies, and material design. IT4Innovations is part of the VSB – Technical University of Ostrava.
More information: www.it4i.cz.