Feelings during the summer of HPC – Ostrava

After one month, I am pleased to say that I am enjoying myself here. I think it is not an exaggeration to say that everything has happened according to Murphy’s law. J So I am full of positive experiences, let’s see what has happened…

The city:

The first thing you should know is that the city has a big history of industry. Since the 1870s the city has constructed many mines and has received “the steel heart of the republic” nickname. The (famous and rich) Rotschild family are also interested in the local industry of business. They own a restaurant here.

It is also important to note, that it is a fancy city center, there is an amazing real iron smelter industry museum protected by UNESCO. The museum is huge and you are allowed to see everything. It has a 350 meter tall tower. You can reach the top if you would like, but you have to be careful, since near the top you have to walk around the tower on a very narrow and transparent sidewalk.

Supercomputing center:

• Based on the close relationship among the city and industries, it is not surprising that the Czech National Supercomputing Center machine was placed in Ostrava. IT4I should be proud of it, since this machine is the 40^th strongest machine in the world in 2015. The Salomon cluster consists of 1008 compute nodes, totaling 24192 compute cores with 129TB RAM and giving over 2 Pflop/s theoretical peak performance. Of course the power is not everything. We had a guided tour of the whole system, it is full of amazing and “green” technology. For instance, there is a room sized diesel motor to maintain the power electricity during a power cut, the heat produced by the supercomputer is used by the heating system during the winter. The room of the supercomputer has reduced Oxygen level air to prevent fire and maintain the optimal environment. The cooling system of the HPCs are combined with air and water cooling, and of course it is very complex since this system can cool the diesel engines also.

Environment and work:

• The building is very new and it looks very modern. It is a very nice place to work.
• All the people who work here are very kind and friendly. Unfortunately due to an operating system error, I lost all of my data on my disk, but they did everything that was possible to retrieve my data. For instance, they gave me some storage, docking system, another laptop, and they also helped me to order a new disk for my laptop. I would like to say thank you again, since they are a really good colleagues.

Leisure time:

• During the summer the biggest music festival in the Czech Republic is held in Ostrava. It is called Colours of Ostrava, and we were very lucky to have visited it. It was a great music festival I liked it very much.
• With my travel mates (Anthony and Sergio) we visited the city center to watch movies. We, of course, saw the new Terminator movie to prepare ourselves for the likely case that the supercomputer becomes self-aware, like the Skynet: