As Bernard Ivezic/Poslovni Dnevnik writes on the 24th of March, 2020, the Croatian supercomputer ”Isabella” has been made available to researchers fighting the world’s current coronavirus pandemic. The SRCE (HEART) University Computing Centre, which houses the Isabella supercomputer, called on all researchers to contact them and use their facilities in the fight against the virus.
“Srce would like to invite all researchers and scientists involved in coronavirus pandemic research effort to contact us if they need significant computing power and storage for modeling, simulation or data processing purposes,” the university writes.
Isabella is a supercomputer made up of 3,100 processor cores for arbitrary demanding calculations and 12 NVIDIA V100 graphics processors suitable for AI algorithms. In addition, SRCE adds that their HTC Cloud provides 600 processor cores and 150 TB of data storage where arbitrary software systems and applications can be launched in a simple and flexible manner.
“Experts can also support the installation and setup of scientific applications required for research,” SRCE noted.
Six years ago, it was announced that by 2020, Isabella would become one of the 500 fastest supercomputers in the whole world. It then had 800 cores and a speed of 10 TFLOPS. At that time, the slowest among the TOP500 of the world’s supercomputers was the German Wetterdienst, which had 7280 processor cores and a speed of 133 TFLOPS, while the fastest was the Chinese Tianhe with 3.12 million cores and a speed of 33.8 thousand TFLOPS.
The first major step in building one of the 500 fastest supercomputers in the world in Croatia began two years ago, when at the celebration of its fifteenth anniversary, SRCE announced that Isabella would triple its capacity as another supercomputer, VELEbit, joined it.
In the meantime, the title of the strongest Croatian supercomputer was taken by Rijeka’s Bura. However, a new supercomputer is being created at the national level in Croatia, which would connect existing supercomputers through the cloud, and this project, called the Croatian Science and Education Cloud, should create a supercomputer with 20,000 processors and 4 petabytes of memory.
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