RONCC Service Catalogue
Infrastructure
Internal
The most important operational infrastructure of the Romanian HPC Competence Centre (RO NCC) is ICIPRO platform, hosted by the National Institute for Research and Development in Informatics (ICI Bucharest).
Financed via the Sectoral Operational Program Increase of Economic Competitiveness, "Structural Instruments / SMIS 48594", ICIPRO represents the first consistent initiative related to Cloud Computing for public administration, academia and SMEs in Romania.
ICIPRO computing resources lead to the avoidance of acquiring oversized infrastructures for services that actually end up having limited use;
ICIPRO combines the benefits of the public cloud (on-demand, self-service, scalability), with those usually associated with on-premise environments (governance, predictability, control) and is presented mainly as an infrastructure service - IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service).
Among the advantages of using ICIPRO infrastructure are to be mentioned:
- Due to its integrated monitoring capabilities, the ICIPRO platform can objectively indicate how often a public service is used.
- The technical solution components come from trustworthy large-scale manufacturers, able to consistently support not only the implementation of such components in Romania, but also their maintenance after commissioning.
- It has a constant computing power of approximately 44 Tflops, with 2240 X86 architecture cores, 432.5 TB usable storage, and 10 GB connections,
- The ICIPRO infrastructure has adapted to the heterogeneous requirements of its users, such as the need to solve large computational tasks.
- A particular service template has been created for different HPC models: Data Analytics, MPI (Numerical solvers/scientific simulations), and parametric sweep (batch).
The ICIPRO computational resources can be used by several categories of beneficiaries, including:
- Academic researchers who can apply for computational resources via ICIPRO subscriptions;
- State authority users, who can access additional computational resources via the ICIPRO project;
- SMEs and start-ups who can lease computational cycles via commercial contracts for business development;
- Its resources can also be used for sandbox programs to test new technologies within “in vitro” projects.
External
RONCC facilitates access to external HPC infrastructure provided by:
- EuroHPC JU;
- EuroCC;
- Other NCCs' national infrastructures.
Training
Internal
The portfolio of training programs includes an HPC "Introduction to MPI (Message Passing Interface)" online course, which provides an excellent foundation for learners to develop their knowledge of parallel programming. The course has the following modules:
- Introduction to HPC
- Parallelism - The PCAM Method
- Supercomputer architecture: Symmetrical multiprocessing architecture, Cluster architecture, State-of-the-Art architectures
- Basic MPI: introduction to MPI, parallel programming concepts, the six necessary MPI commands
- MPI Collective: Barrier, Gather, Scatter, Reduce, All-Gather, All-To-All, All-Reduce
The course can be downloaded from here.
External
Technical Competences
The technical competences of RONCC include :
- Artificial Intelligence/Machine learning
- Image processing and analysis, computer vision;
- Advanced data analytics (Hadoop/Spark)
- Parallel and distributed computing
- Cloud computing
- Cluster administration
- Software development
- Cybersecurity
Consultancy Services
RONCC Consultancy Services comprise the following actions:
- Support Industry/SMEs, Public Administration, Academia and Research organizations in integrating HPC/HPDA/AI in their research and development initiatives.
- Match user needs to available national or European HPC/HPDA/AI resources.
- Promote and increase the results of HPC innovation in research and development ;
- Support collaboration between private sector stakeholders (SMEs), national and international research and development institutes, the governmental sector, scientific communities in academia, start-up accelerators, etc.
Support Services
- RONCC team identifies potential and existing HPC/HPDA users, analyses their use case and starts a needs identification process;
- Based on the identified needs, an analysis is carried out considering internal and external existing HPC/HPDA/AI services and resources;
- A match is done between the existing services and users needs.
Access
RONCC facilitates access to HPC infrastructure and training provided by
- EuroHPC JU;
- EuroCC;
- Other NCCs national infrastructures.
Awareness Creation
Dissemination activities:
- Social media channels: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter
- Promotional movies
- Participation in events, organization of events
- RONCC website: newsletter, news section
What we disseminate:
- Info related to EU HPC infrastructure developments
- EuroHPC JU developments
- Info about training events at the national and EU level
- EU innovation initiatives – information on EU funding programs for HPC (FF4EuroHPC, Prace, etc)
- Info related to Romanian infrastructure developments
- RONCC center activities – what we do and the services we provide
- RONCC and external events
- HPC benefits for SMEs, administration and academia
- Publications on HPC/HPDA/AI
- Special posts about the History of HPC (#HPCHistory)
- Special posts about HPC inspired projects/activities/areas that HPC can/could improve
Support for application to funding initiatives
RONCC provides guidance and support for application to funding programs such as:
- FF4EUROHPC Open Call for SMEs
- PRACE CALLS FOR PROPOSALS
- Euro HPC JU