Arctur opened its Data Centre doors

25. 10. 2021 / eHealth, GOV & NGOs, Heritage, Industry, Tourism On October 18, we celebrate Exascale Day, a day dedicated to the new generation of the most powerful supercomputers. Under the roof of the SLING National Competence Center, partners prepared a rich program on this occasion and opened the doors of five national supercomputer centers. Among them, Arctur also opened its doors to visitors.

Slovenian Competence Center for Supercomputing Within SLING, the National Competence Center, which is being developed within the European project EuroCC, education, training and networking in the field of supercomputing, for the needs of research in science and industry, in the academic field and in the provision of public services is promoted. SLING offers infrastructure, expert support and free training on the use of supercomputers. The partners also offer assistance to small and medium-sized companies, as in addition to using Slovenian supercomputer capabilities, partners can help them apply for European projects and thus obtain the additional funds they need for research and development.

Supercomputer Center Open Day The consortium partners observed the Exascale Day bringing supercomputing, its use and the extraordinary opportunities it brings to the economy, science and the community closer to a wider audience. The doors were opened by 5 supercomputer centers. The Institute of Information Sciences in Maribor presented one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world and in Slovenia, EuroHPC Vega. In addition to Vega, visitors also saw the Maister supercomputer at the University of Maribor, the supercomputer clusters of the Academic and Research Network of Slovenia - Arnes and the Jožef Stefan Institute on Teslova ulica in Ljubljana, HPC Trdina at the Faculty of Information Studies in Novo mesto and one of the few private supercomputers in Europe, Arctur-2 in the company Arctur in Nova Gorica.

On this occasion, Arctur hosted high school and university students from Nova Gorica. The guest lecturer, Professor Riccardo Bernardini, an established researcher from the University of Udine, specialized in quantum computing, supercomputing and advanced technologies, inspired the participants with the development and use of Ultra Cool Computer (UCC), and Tomi Ilijaš, director of Arctur, presented Arctur's supercomputer and accompanied visitors on a guided tour. Anyone unable to attend the on-site tour was invited to a web presentation and virtual tour of the supercomputer centers.

At this occasion, Tomi Ilijaš, Arctur´s CEO, adds: “We want to show to young that engineering work is also interesting and can bring immense satisfaction when you can create systems from scratch that work for the benefit of many people. We want to encourage them not only to be content with being users of these technologies but instead to embark on a journey into the center of knowledge to immerse themselves in the secrets of bits and chips that only a few understand. ”

Technologies of the future Selected date, 18.10. however, it was not determined by chance. Exascale computers are the supercomputers of the future that will be able to compute at least 10^18 floating-point operations per second (1 exaFLOPS). This remarkable computing power can be more easily illustrated by the following comparison: every human being on Earth would have to calculate 24 hours a day for more than four years to calculate what an Exascale supercomputer can calculate in 1 second.

 

Read more about this event in selected media (in Slovene language only):

Primorske Novice 

STA Znanost

RTV SLO MMC