Inauguration of PSNC-Huawei Innovation Center

Inauguration of PSNC-Huawei Innovation Center

On 22 January 2016 on the premises of the Polish Optical Internet Research Center (Poznań, Poland) the official inauguration of PSNC-Huawei Innovation Center will be held. One of the main points of the planned event is the official launch of the HPC computer system “Orzeł / Eagle” with a performance of 1.4 PFlops computing power, currently occupying 2nd place in Poland and 80th position on TOP500 list.

PSNC-Huawei Innovation Center was established under an agreement signed on 23 November 2015 in Shanghai during the Polish-Chinese Economic Forum with participation of the President of Poland Andrzej Duda.

The aim of the first phase will be the collaboration of Huawei and PSNC research teams on topics related to data processing systems in the cloud (Cloud Computing), data storage in the cloud (cloud storage) and supercomputers. Cloud solutions are becoming more popular in commercial solutions because of the clear business model, which relies on a more economical use of computing resources borrowed from the owner (service provider). In turn, supercomputers are built for applications that require the most advanced computational resources in terms of speed, as well as the size of the memory. Examples include engineering simulations, the study of the human brain, or the desire to use energy from fusion, alternative energy source of the future: a low-cost solution, yet safe.

In terms of advanced calculations, PSNC and Huawei will work on: optimizing the Ceph platform to build data infrastructure, optimization of software for the implementation of parallel computing for new computing architectures, putting computers based on these architectures on the TOP500 list – the fastest computing systems in the world and Green500 – the most effective systems in terms of energy. In this case, the key aspect is IT security, without which it would not be possible to use computers and data processing in business, ensuring at the same time an adequate level of protection.

As a result of implementation of CBPIO and FUTURE ICT structural projects, Polish scientific community received an advanced next generation ICT research infrastructure, which supports scientific research and development as well as implementation activities of both: scientific community and industry, in particular SMEs. This will ensure the acceleration of innovation processes based on the integration with ICT. As a result of CBPIO and FutureICT projects, the processing and data collection node (LabITaaS – IT Laboratory as a Software) was created, offering cloud-based services on a previously inaccessible level.

The main element of the HPC cloud is Orzeł / Eagle computer system with a performance of 1.4 PFlops computing power, currently occupying 2nd place in Poland and 80th position on TOP500 list. The service access to laboratories and the calculations of HPC will be offered to academic community and SMEs in the HPC cloud model. It will support, among others, the multiple research works carried out in the PSNC-Huawei Innovation Center. It will also be a part of building a greater computing system in Europe, carried out under PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe).