History & Milestones

Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center (PSNC) was established by decision of the College of Rectors of the City of Poznan and affiliated to the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Poznan on 23rd October 1993.

The purpose of establishing PSNC was to coordinate the use of metropolitan network and supercomputers in Poznan by units represented in the College of Rectors of the City of Poznan. In the following years PSNC’s activity effectively led to the launch of a pilot national POL-34 network, and then to the creation of a programme to build a national network Polish Optical Internet within the PIONIER programme. Subsequent structural projects PLATON, NewMAN, MAN-HA and 100net provided funding for the development of the network at the national level and implementation of advanced services and applications for its users.

Starting from launching the first CRAY Y-MP EL supercomputer, PSNC has also been systematically developing high-performance computing services based on supercomputers, which for a total of 10 years have been present among 500 strongest supercomputers in the world. Thanks to that, since 2008, PSNC represents Poland in the PRACE consortium and Polish scientists have the possibility to use the strongest supercomputers in Europe. Launched in 2015, the Eagle supercomputer was continuously on the TOP-500 list and apart from using it for scientific calculations, it is the foundation of PSNC-Huawei Innovation Centre.

The development of competence and increase in the number of staff (in 2000 PSNC employed over 60 people, and in 2010 already over 200), as well as modern infrastructure, have allowed, since 2001, to effectively acquire projects in competitions of European Framework Programmes and national research programmes. To date, PSNC has implemented over 350 such projects.

Milestones