Surfing in the HBONE+

After 3 weeks of acclimatization in Budapest, I am finally ready to present you the NIIF Institute where I am currently working with Elisavet. The first weeks were mostly about learning how to use new tools and how to send jobs to the supercomputer network. One of our mentors, Gábor Rőczei, showed us how complex and sophisticated the supercomputer management can be… As a mere physicist, I was very impressed by all the technology required to administrate a cluster of supercomputers.

Hungarian Backbone Network (HBONE+) developed by NIIFI

Concerning the computing facilities here at Budapest, we are pretty lucky! The National Information Infrastructure Development Program serves as a framework for the development and operation of the research network in Hungary. This institute is charged of the development of the high-speed computer network which is extremely useful for research and academic purposes. In addition to the support task, NIIFI also participates as an active HPC promotor in Europe. Below you can see the logo of the HBONE+ network which represents all the supercomputers around Hungary, Budapest being in the middle.

HBONE+ Logo

The network is very extended, however it is mostly constituted of four supercomputers with the following technical skills:

• Budapest: 5 Tflops, 754 cores (2.2 GHz), 50 TB disc.
• Debrecen: 18 Tflops, 1536 cores (3.33 GHz), 1.5 PB disc.
• Szeged: 14 Tflops, 2304 cores (2.2 GHz), 240 TB disc + 2 GPU nodes.
• Pécs: 10.5 Tflops, 1152 cores (2.66 GHz), 500 TB disc.

If you put them all together, then you obtain: 47.5 Tflops, 2.3 PB of Hard Disc and 5796 cores! You can check a picture of the supercomputer of Budapest in Elizavet’s post. We have accounts in all of them and can connect whenever we want to run simulations, moreover the support team is always available to solve technical problems. I hope I have convinced you that there are a lot of HPC development efforts in Hungary and it will certainly be an extremely powerful network in the next years.

Budapest Parliament

The special social event we had here was the visit of the Parliament of Budapest. To be honest, I thought it wasn’t that nice to visit a Parliament… However, I must say that it was awesome! It is by far the most spectacular building of the city, it is on Danube riverside and during the night it is beautifully illuminated.

Parliament by night

Inside the Parliament, the guards look after the jewels and the Holly crown (credits: kenkaminesky)

The construction started in 1885 and finished 24 years later in 1904. The main hall is breathtaking and in the top you can see a fabulous hexagonal dome.One of the particularities of this building is that it was amongst the first to have air conditioned  with a very sly {fan+ice cubes} mechanism, heating from the floor and a whole electrical installation. Pretty modern for the beginning of the 20th century! On the historical side, the Hungarian Magna Carta was the second written in Europe after the English one. Next to the main hall, you can find the Upper and Lower Court were political decisions are actually taken. It would not be bad at all to have an office here…

Soon I’ll post a detailed guide of the best bars of Budapest, so stay plugged!