News

After nearly 20 years, the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center returns to the arena of the largest digital art festival in Europe – the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria.

In the scope of the Immersify project PSNC decided to show that 8K streaming can be successfully performed in a lower bandwidth of 200Mbit/s, and thanks to the HEVC codec used in Immersify with a high quality and low delay of a bit more than 1 second. This allowed to perform an interactive demonstration at the TNC19 conference in Tallinn.

TNC is the biggest and most prestigious European research and education networking conference; its 35th edition was held in Tallinn (Estonia) between 16th and 20th of June 2019 and PSNC’s Immersify ambisonic project was there waiting for all the participants and guests.

The EoCoE (Energy Oriented Center of Excellence) project was officially awarded funding for another three-year period by the European Commission along with nine other Centers of Excellence in supercomputing.

EuroHPC Summit Week 2019 will take place from 13 May to 17 May 2019 in Poznań and will gather together the main HPC stakeholders in Europe. The event is co-organised by PRACE, EuroHPC, EXDCI-2, and ETP4HPC. This year’s edition is hosted by Polish PRACE Member – PSNC.

The European project PROTECTIVE has launched the pilot operation testing of the system which should enable automatic sharing of cyber security information. Operators of three European national research and education networks are involved in information sharing – PSNC (Poland), CESNET (Czech Republic) and RoEduNet (Romania).

Despite the name, television is not all about vision. Often underestimated part of transmission, but highly important for appreciation of the content quality, is sound. In some TV formats it is absolutely essential. Does immersive video require special sound? One may argue about definitions, but in some way playing a sound is always an immersive experience. The question is only about intensity.

At the beginning of November, a caesium fountain was launched at the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center. The device was built in the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Teddington near London, under the direction of an outstanding specialist in the field of atomic frequency standards, Dr Krzysztof Szymaniec. The caesium fountain will join the ranks of several most accurate atomic clocks in the world and is the second such clock in Poland.

During this year’s edition of InfoShare 2017, one of the largest technology events in Central and Eastern Europe, Intel has announced the launch and assumptions of its pilot program – Intel Make Tomorrow Poland. Polish partners of the project are: PSNC, Copernicus Science Center, Information Society Development Foundation, Educational Entrepreneurship Foundation and Children’s University Foundation.

The IBM research team in Zurich set up a project to develop a methodology for estimating the performance, power consumption and cost of exascale systems. The project is called Algorithms and Machines (A&M) and is part of DOME, a joint program with the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON). Within the project PSNC offered access to Orzel / Eagle, a supercomputer to support the project.

The e-Infrastructure Reflection Group (e-IRG) has published a new version of its Roadmap document. The e-IRG Roadmap 2016 is taking up the e-Infrastructure Commons concept. The document intends to define a clear route on how to evolve the European e-Infrastructure system further. The new Roadmap edition aims to turn the vision of the e-Infrastructure Commons into reality by 2020, and has recommendations to all stakeholders to progress on the way towards the e-Infrastructure Commons. The document was prepared by PSNC employees: Marcin Lawenda, Ph.D. and Norbert Meyer, Ph.D.

The EU H2020 ESCAPE project (www.hpc-escape.eu) brings together numerical weather prediction (NWP), climate and high-performance computing (HPC) communities to develop world-class, extreme-scale computing capabilities for European operational NWP and future climate models. One of the challenges is to execute complex state-of-the-art models of the atmosphere within tight production schedules.