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Project METACentrum covers majority of activities concerning GRIDs and/or high performance computing in general in the Czech republic. METACentrum is one of strategic projects of CESNET institute.
METACentrum project broadens the infrastructure of academic high-speed network by support for applicatiions requiring extensive computational capacities. The aim of project METACentrum is interconnection of current computational capacity of largest academic centres of the Czech republic and its further enlargement.
METACentrum je currently composed of several collaborating supercomputing centers sharing computational capacities. Nowasays the participants of METACentrum project are:
Systems administrated by the project form virtual distributed computer, recently called the Grid. The goal is to hide for users unimportant differences among individual concrete systems forming the Grid, allow synchronous usage of those resources and therefore provide the computational capacity exceeding possibilities of individual centres.
The CESNET institute was established by univerzities and Acadeny of Sciences of the Czech republic in 1996. Its primary goal is to operate and develope academic backbone network of the Czech republic. Current generation of this network is named CESNET2 and at the backbone routes offers gigabytes per second tranfers speed. The main aims of CESNET institute are following: operation and development of national high-speed network for science, research and education purposes; research and development of advanced network technologies and their applications and, finally, spreading of modern network technologies information into general public. CESNET is long-time provider of Czech academic network and participant of corresponding international projects. Following projects belong to the most significant: part in Dante project, membership in TERENA association, international partnership in Internet2 consortium and participation in European project GN2 (previous projects GEANT, QUANTUM/TEN-155, TEN-34).
The main aim of the project is constitution of a virtual computer that allows effective utilization of installed facilities in the frame of supercomputing project. The project simultaneously enables solving of tasks whose memory and/or CPU requirements exceeds possibility of individual single supercomputing centers (nodes). The goal of METACentrum project is to offer to METACentrum users uniform and unified access to all computational resources without necessity of repeated login.
The METACentrum structure is at the same time flexible enough that in a case of other computational subjects (nodes) interest, these can be easily and functionally intergrated in current METACentrum system to allow continual expansion of computational capacities.
Generally speaking, the project has to support integration of supercomputing systems into higher units (so-callled GRIDs-dynamic, virtual computational, informational and knowledge systems, i.e. in the first place sets of high-performance computers interconnected by high-speed networks aimed for solving of the most demanding computational and data problems) and to participate at formation of national GRID in the Czech republic together with its connection into international environment including solving of EU frameworks projects.
The concrete activities for current year include broadening of computational and disc capacity of distributed PC cluster, development of METACentrum infrastructure, continued integration into international GRIDs, providing of large informational services including dynamical ones through METACentrum portal, other development of authorization infrastructure. Utilization of METACentrum and other available international GRIDs resources for realization of large computational jobs from computational chemistry and molecular modelling (CCMM), high energy physics (HEP), computational fluid dynamics (CFD), computational solid mechanics (CSM) and computer-aided engineering (CAE) areas will continue in this year as well.