VSB – Technical University of Ostrava is the leading research, development, and innovation center active in the fields of High-Performance Computing (HPC), Data Analysis (HPDA), and Artificial Intelligence (AI) and their application to other scientific fields, industry, and society. It operates the most powerful supercomputing systems in the Czech Republic, which are provided to Czech and foreign research teams from both academia and industry.
The petascale system Karolina, acquired as part of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, was installed in 2021. In the TOP500 list, which evaluates supercomputers in terms of their performance, it ranked 69th worldwide, 19th in Europe, and in the Green500 list of the most energy-efficient supercomputers, it even ranked 15th.
The new supercomputer reaches a theoretical peak performance of 15.7 PFlop/s, which corresponds to 15.7 quadrillion (10^15) floating-point operations per second.
The supercomputer consists of 6 main parts:
- a universal part for standard numerical simulations, which consists of approximately 720 computer servers with a theoretical peak performance of 3.8 PFlop/s,
- an accelerated part with 72 servers, each of them being equipped with 8 GPU accelerators, providing a performance of 11 PFlop/s for standard HPC simulations and up to 360 PFlop/s for artificial intelligence computations,
- a part designated for large dataset processing that provides a shared memory of up to 24 TB, and a performance of 74 TFlop/s,
- 36 servers with a performance of 192 TFlop/s for providing cloud services,
- a high-speed network to connect all parts as well as individual servers at a speed of up to 200 Gb/s,
- data storage providing space for 1.4 PB of user data processing; it also includes high-speed data storage with a speed of 1 TB/s for simulations as well as computations in the fields of advanced data analysis and artificial intelligence.
A group of experienced HPC specialists from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) including former SGI experts teamed up with Bareos engineers to validate the architecture and the design. As a result, the Bareos systems were tuned to meet HPC performance requirements. Together with ReaR (Relax-and-Recover) Bareos provides a Bare Metal Disaster Recovery Solution.