SLING Days
Four Points by Sheraton Ljubljana Mons
We would like to invite you to the "Slovenian Supercomputing Network Days" or "SLING Days", which will take place at the Four Points by Sheraton Ljubljana Mons Hotel.
Get to know the Slovenian Supercomputing Network (SLING) and learn about the latest developments in supercomputing in Slovenia and Europe.
The varied program includes presentations on the activities of the National Competence Center for Supercomputing and Centres of Excellence in Supercomputing. We will also present examples of effective use of powerful supercomputers in industry and academia, and explain the possibilities of access to these systems for different users.
Registration is required for this event, which is part of the EuroCC 2 project and the ARNES conference "Mreža znanja".
The event and the workshops are free of charge.
In addition, you will be able to follow the main part of the conference program via live streaming.
Join us and deepen your understanding of the world of supercomputing.
EuroCC 2 project has received funding from the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (JU) under grant agreement No 101101903. The JU receives support from the Digital Europe Programme and Germany, Bulgaria, Austria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, France, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Slovakia, Norway, Türkiye, Republic of North Macedonia, Iceland, Montenegro, Serbia.
National Competence Centre SLING is co-funded by the Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Innovation, Republic of Slovenia.
Fakulteta za računalništvo in informatiko, Univerza v Ljubljani
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The event will kick off with a 1-hour theoretical session, where participants will be introduced to the core concepts of multiscale simulations. The presentation will cover the following key topics:
- Overview of MultiXscale CoE,
- Introduction to Ultrasound and open boundary water simulations,
- LAMMPS code,
- Overview of EESSI (European Environment for Scientific Software Installations), including how it works and implementation.After the theoretical session, participants will transition into 2-hour hands-on challenge:
- The challenge will involve performing a simulation using LAMMPS with Kokkos in EESSI.
- Participants will simulate the flow past a sphere, utilizing the VEGA supercomputer for calculations.
- This challenge will be a practical application of the tools and concepts covered during the theoretical presentation.Prerequisites:
- Basic knowledge of Python and Bash,
- Access to a VEGA account to participate in the simulation.
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The event will kick off with a 1-hour theoretical session, where participants will be introduced to the core concepts of multiscale simulations. The presentation will cover the following key topics:
- Overview of MultiXscale CoE,
- Introduction to Ultrasound and open boundary water simulations,
- LAMMPS code,
- Overview of EESSI (European Environment for Scientific Software Installations), including how it works and implementation.After the theoretical session, participants will transition into 2-hour hands-on challenge:
- The challenge will involve performing a simulation using LAMMPS with Kokkos in EESSI.
- Participants will simulate the flow past a sphere, utilizing the VEGA supercomputer for calculations.
- This challenge will be a practical application of the tools and concepts covered during the theoretical presentation.Prerequisites:
- Basic knowledge of Python and Bash,
- Access to a VEGA account to participate in the simulation.
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The plenary session will be held in English and present topics, such as: NCC collaboration, SMASH postdoctoral program, EuroHPC Vega supercomputer, SLING service portfolio, and a panel discussion about Women in HPC.
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Samo Stanič will present the organization and mission of the SLING consortium and the challenges we will face in the field of supercomputing in the coming years. Participation in SLING enables Slovenian scientists to competitively engage in major international research trends in particle physics, astrophysics, materials science, and other fields where high computational power is essential for simulations and analyses. One of the goals is also to increase involvement of industry, as advanced supercomputing infrastructure opens doors to new scientific, technological, and economically successful breakthroughs, which are expected with the emergence and spread of artificial intelligence across all fields.
Samo Stanič is the head of the Center for Astrophysics and Cosmology at the University of Nova Gorica, where he studies cosmic high-energy photons and charged particles of extreme energies, as well as related phenomena in the universe using the Cherenkov Telescope Array and Pierre Auger observatories. Since 2022, he has been the coordinator of SLING.
Speaker: Prof. Samo Stanič (Univerza v Novi Gorici) -
HPC Vega is in its fourth year of operation and has hosted over 80 large-scale EuroHPC JU and domestic projects. In parallel HPC Vega has supported or still supporting many development and smaller benchmark projects, altogether more than 1000 researchers and other users working on 400 projects, representing all major scientific domains. HPC Vega infrastructure is used by development and research activities within EU projects Intertwin, EPICURE, and SMASH. IZUM together with partners supports several Centres of Excellence (like MultiXScale and Max3) and activities of EuroCC SLING led by Arnes. Resources of HPC Vega are available also on commercial pay-per-use terms. Some companies from Slovenia and abroad already run their calculations on HPC Vega. A presentation will provide information on best practices to access such a large public research HPC infrastructure.
Dejan Valh has been the Head of the supercomputing sector for several years, and before that he was the Head of the system support sector at IZUM for many years, where he was employed as a system engineer in 2000. He was one of the technical experts at the tender in the HPC RIVR project, where Slovenia acquired the HPC Vega, the most powerful supercomputer in Slovenia, and later worked as the Head of the HPC RIVR expert council, then as the SLING coordinator, and was an associate member of the INFRAG infrastructure advisory group at to the EuroHPC JU, which jointly funded HPC Vega in 2021.
Speaker: Dejan Valh (Institute of Information Science) -
On overview of the core services provided by SLING as the Slovenian EuroHPC National Competence Centre will serve to round up the presentation of SLING and it biggest HPC system. Our activities centre on getting individual users, research groups, development teams and companies up and using the infrastructure as soon as possible, but we will also present the kinds of access modes and support that we can offer and where to get advanced support by domain experts in Slovenia or in the EuroHPC ecosystem at large.
Jan Jona Javoršek works in digital humanities, computational linguistics and has contributed in distributed computing initiatives, the establishment of the Slovenian National Supercomputing Network SLING, EOSC initiatives and EuroHPC projects, such as HPC Vega and MaX Centre of Excellence.
Speaker: Jan Jona Javoršek (Jožef Stefan” Institute) -
In recent years, computer experts have transitioned from mainly designing supercomputers to becoming significant users. The lecture will explore the reasons for the twist, primarily driven by advancements in graphics accelerators. We will delve into the design of graphics accelerators, highlighting the importance of special computational units like tensor cores and new number representations to excel developments in artificial intelligence.
Uroš Lotrič is a professor at the Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana. He lectures courses on distributed and high-performance computing. His main research interests include approximate and high-performance computing. He is involved in the national supercomputing competence center and cooperates on several European supercomputing projects.
Speaker: Uroš Lotrič (Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana) -
The presentation addresses overheating issues in server room and discusses of monitoring solution at University of Nova Gorica. The proposed solution involves using Raspberry Pi with different sensors to independently monitor temperature and with possibility for extension with other sensors (smoke, light, etc.). Monitoring system (MUNG) is designed to be self-standing with possibility of integration with centralized system, like visualization with Grafana.
Bojan Korečič, is a system maintainer at University of Nova Gorica who combined electronics and computing in a temperature measurement project for the needs of the server rooms at University of Nova Gorica.
Speaker: Bojan Korečič (University of Nova Gorica)
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The plenary session will be held in English and present topics, such as: NCC collaboration, SMASH postdoctoral program, EuroHPC Vega supercomputer, SLING service portfolio, and a panel discussion about Women in HPC.
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The presentation will present our strategy to foster international and national collaboration in the field of high-performance computing. Key objectives of our strategy include:
- Accelerating the dissemination of knowledge and best practices through intensified international cooperation.
- Strengthening partnerships between industry and academia to drive innovation and address real-world challenges.
- Collaborating with the CASTIEL 2 initiative as well as general cooperation with the EuroHPC ecosystem (e.g. Centres of Excellence and EDIHs) to enhance the impact of high-performance computing on research and inovation.
- Fostering national networking and collaboration among National Competence Centers (NCCs) to share knowledge and resources.
- Addressing issues related to intellectual property rights to facilitate collaboration and technology transfer.Milan Ojsteršek is a head of the Laboratory for Heterogeneous Computer Systems at the University of Maribor, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. His research focuses on heterogeneous computing systems, the semantic web, natural language processing, open-access repositories, and research data archives. He leads the development and operation of Slovenian open-access infrastructure and several international and national projects connected to the open-access infrastructure, open data, knowledge management, and academic integrity. He participated in the HPC RIVR project, which established the Vega and Maister supercomputers. A group from Laboratory for Heterogeneous Computer Systems was established a big data archive.
Speaker: Milan Ojsteršek (Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Maribor) -
The EPICURE project aims to strengthen support for HPC users in scaling and optimising code. EPICURE covers several key areas: code transformation for different architectures, performance analysis, business benchmarking, code transformation and optimisation. Samo will describe an example of a project that has already been optimised and achieved speedup on HPC Vega.
Dr. Žiga Zebec holds a master’s degree in microbial ecology, molecular microbiology and immunobiology and received his PhD (Doctor of Philosophy) for his dissertation on CRISPR systems. He has completed several trainings, PostDoc in the field of synthetic biology. More recently he received funding for the CellD-synBio project from the Ministry of Education and the EU Cohesion fund. Dr. Zebec has published several scientific papers, authored reviews, presented papers at international conferences and participated in EU-funded projects. In 2023 dr. Zebec joined the team of HPC Vega.
Speaker: Žiga Zebec (Institute of Information Science) -
SMASH – is an innovative, intersectoral, career-development training program for postdoctoral researchers, centred on developing cutting-edge machine learning applications for science and humanities.
It is a five year European project, led by the University of Nova Gorica, co-financed by Horizon Europe, Marie Sklodowska Curie COFUND Action. SMASH aims to support 50 postdoctoral researchers that will use the HPC VEGA, and apply machine learning techniques to address some of the world’s most challenging scientific questions. In this presentation I will give an overview of the program that is now in its second year and projects under development by our fellows.
Gabrijela Zaharijas is associated professor of physics at the University of Nova Gorica. She is a PI of the MSCA project SMASH and works on applications of machine learning algorithms to gamma ray astrophysics.
Speaker: Gabrijela Zaharijas (University of Nova Gorica) -
Tomaž Prosen will discuss the current status of quantum computing in NISQ era in the context its utility in fundamental physics research. As an example he will present his recent collaboration with Google Quantum AI lab on simulating quantum transport and full counting statistics in quantum magnets.
Tomaž Prosen is a Full Professor at the Faculty for mathematics and physics, University of Ljubljana, and leads a resarch group for Nonequilibrium quantum and statistical physics. His main research focus is in quantum many-body physics and exactly solvable models of dynamics.
Speaker: Tomaž Prosen (Department of Physics, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, University of Ljubljana) -
The panel discussion is organized as an activity of the Central European Chapter of Women in HPC, committed to raising awareness of the unique challenges women face in high-performance computing (HPC) and advocating for inclusive policies and practices within organizations. By promoting these values, they aim to create a more welcoming environment for everyone in HPC.
We will host users and researchers who work with HPC in their fields. They will share their experiences, perspectives, and advice on how to establish a more inclusive environment for women and achieve greater balance in this area.
Claudia Blaas-Schenner studied Technical Physics at TU Wien, where she also earned her PhD and completed her postdoc. She started with supercomputer calculations in 1990 and has since delved deeper into the field. Today, Claudia Blaas-Schenner is one of the world's most recognised HPC experts. In 2015, she founded the training programme at Austria’s supercomputer, the VSC, and has been its director ever since. She is one of the top experts in MPI and chair of the EuroMPI/Australia 2024 conference.
Alja Prah is part of the supercomputing team at Jožef Stefan Institute, involved with supporting most Slovenian supercomputers. At the same time she is continuing to pursue her research (from which she obtained a PhD in Pharmacy in 2021) as part of the Theory Department at the National Institute of Chemistry.
Ivona Vasileska has a PhD in nuclear engineering and has been a researcher and teaching assistant at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. Her research focuses on plasma physics, nuclear fusion, and high-performance computing (HPC). In recent years, she has expanded her work to parallel computing for machine learning. Vasileska has contributed to over 12 European projects in fusion and HPC and has authored more than 30 journal and conference papers in high-impact publications in fusion, and HPC.
Iva Černoša is a PhD student of bioinformatics at University of Ljubljana. She uses supercomputers as part of her research for analysis of big genomic files and to train models for prediction of gene expression in plants.
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