IT4Innovations – Czech supercomputers ready to combat coronavirus

IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Centre at VŠB – Technical University of Ostrava has offered its users from academic institutions priority access to its computational resources to solve problems regarding the Covid-19 disease research. Applicants focused on mitigating the coronavirus spread may submit the project proposals within the “Director’s Discretion scheme”. Applications will be approved immediately and given significantly higher priority to use the IT4Innovations computational resources.

IT4Innovations provides Czech and international research teams from both academia and industry with state-of-the-art HPC and data analysis technologies and services. IT4Innovations currently operates four supercomputers – Anselm (launched in summer 2013, 94 TFlop/s), Salomon (launched in summer 2015, 2 PFlop/s), Barbora (launched in 2019, 826 TFlop/s), and DGX-2, a specialized system for artificial intelligence calculations (launched in 2019, 94 TFlop/s up to 2 PFlop/s). In 2020, a petascale system entitled EURO_IT4I is to be launched within the EuroHPC Joint Technology Initiative.

IT4Innovations is also a research centre with strong international links. Key research areas include big data processing and analysis, machine learning, development of parallel scalable algorithms, solution of large engineering problems, and modelling for nanotechnologies. IT4Innovations is a part of VŠB – Technical University of Ostrava and the HPC node to the Czech e-infrastructure.

IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Centre