SC25: HPC ignites
The ‘Gold Contributor’ goes to the ICM UW for its contribution to the construction of the Scinet network, as well as the consortium projects PIONIER-Q, KDM4EOSC, and Gaia AI Factory, as part of substantive cooperation and strengthening a common front with PCSS and Cyfronet on the international stage, we have concluded intense days of work during the SC conference in St. Louis, preceded by many months of preparation with an international team of vendors and engineers of the best networking solutions.
“We have been involved in the construction of the SCinet network since 2019, including for several years as a supplier of the virtual network laboratory, which is created many months before the installation of the physical equipment—the equipment in St. Louis is worth a total of $70 million. In this way, the University of Warsaw, and in particular we as representatives of our data center, are constantly present at the main, global conference dedicated to HPC, networks, storage, and data analysis,” says Jarosław Skomiał from ICM UW – SCinet Routing Team.
“Building such a network is like constructing a racing car engine, with the difference that the individual components come from various manufacturers. It’s amazing that, relying on such diverse solutions, we manage, sometimes with more, sometimes with less effort, to launch the latest architectures, interfaces, and protocols, as well as automate their configuration. This year, we achieved a throughput of 13.72 Tbps. And when we finally launch the network and deal with all the emerging problems, the moment comes… to dismantle and pack everything back into boxes. However, we take the acquired experience with us and use it when working on projects at ICM,” comments Bartosz Drogosiewicz from ICM UW – SCinet Routing Team
“Our involvement also includes long meetings with an international group of specialists: representatives of universities, government agencies, high-performance computing centers, research and education networks, telecommunications operators, and equipment manufacturers. After many months of preparation and online meetings, we travel to the location a week before the event to jointly ensure a high-throughput network that allows for connection, large data transfer, and the running of scientific experiments. During the conference, we monitor the network performance, and in the meantime, we share know-how, also through tutorials and mentoring,” adds Jarosław Skomiał.
Common challenges
“During SC25, together with our project partners from the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center (PCSS) and the Academic Computer Centre Cyfronet AGH, we are uniting our strengths and experience to shape the space for quantum infrastructure, artificial intelligence development, and advanced networks through jointly implemented projects,” says Dr. Eng. Robert Sot, Director of ICM UW.
One such initiative is PIONIER-Q, a project that is an integral part of the European quantum communication infrastructure EuroQCI, based on the existing fiber-optic infrastructure of the PIONIER network and using encryptors and devices for Quantum Key Distribution (QKD).
We also cooperate within KDM4EOSC, which is the National Data Repository connected to EOSC (European Open Science Cloud); a universal infrastructure for storing and sharing data and efficiently processing large volumes of data in HPC, BigData, and Artificial Intelligence models.
Gaia AI Factory was also presented in St. Louis, one of the latest initiatives within the EuroHPC JU. The Polish AI Factory is set to become a national center of excellence, offering state-of-the-art infrastructure to handle advanced artificial intelligence tasks. Its heart will be a new supercomputer optimized for AI computations, enabling the training, testing, and deployment of artificial intelligence models on a large scale.
See you at SC26 Chicago!
Video reports
