SKIF and JINR Signed Collaboration Agreement

Shared Research Facility “Siberian Circular Photon Source” of Boreskov Institute of Catalysis (SRF “SKIF”) and Meshcheryakov Laboratory of Information Technologies of the Joint Institute of Nuclear Research (LIT JINR) began their collaboration in making the IT-infrastructure of SRF “SKIF” and professional training of experts for its maintenance and operation.

“JINR has a developed IT-infrastructure, its characteristics include compactness, productivity, efficiency in consuming energy, and scalability. This infrastructure is based on Govorun supercomputer. It solves problems coming from all laboratories of JINR, including those from the megascience plant, NICA collider. Such plants can be called manufactures for generating scientific data, as they produce terabites of information every day that is necessary to collect, process, and store. We plan to make a similar infrastructure complex in SKIF, so the JINR experience is so important for us”, noted Dr. Eugene Levichev, Director of SRF “SKIF”.

Within the framework of the collaboration the parties have developed the technical specifications for the Center of Data Processing of SKIF Beamlines consisting of highly productive computer and the information storage system. On this basis the technical design specifications for CDP has been prepared and passed to the general contractor for SRF “SKIF”, AO “KONTSERN TITAN-2”.

“In LIT JINR we have accumulated great experience in creating and development of global computer infrastructure for the experiments in Large Hadron Collider in CERN. Using this experience we actively develop distributed systems of collecting, storage, processing, analysis of data for experiments in the accelerator complex NICA on the basis of integration of grid, clouds, supercomputers, datalakes. We are ready to share our experience with the colleagues from SKIF megaproject in creating and development of the infrastructure of storage, processing, and analysis of data for this project as well as its integration into the distributed medium of megascience projects”, commented Dr. Vladimir Korenkov, Director of LIT JINR.

An important aspect of operation of the future CDP SRF “SKIF” is organization of the distributed storage and access to scientific data with the use of megascience datalake technology. The specialists of SRF “SKIF” and JINR will work together on making such system.

“This approach would allow access to the experimental data to the wide circle of interested users, first of all, to the research community. This is one of the trends of development of science today”, said Dr. Yan Zubavichus, Deputy Director in Science of SRF “SKIF”

In addition, since 2021 the National Research Computer Network (NRCN) is being formed in Russia, JINR's Govorun already participates in it. Furthermore this network is planned to join all supercomputer centers in the country, including the supercomputer of SRF “SKIF”. Thus, the scientists from different regions of Russia will be able to efficiently use the supercomputer capacities. The specialists from JINR will share information on the steps necessary for being included in NRCN with SRF “SKIF”.

Also for SRF “SKIF” the area of supercomputing modeling is important: surrogate, mathematic, imitation, statistical. This will be still another subject for collaboration with JINR.

The organizations also plan to establish educational programs on system administration of supercomputer infrastructure. The young specialists of SRF “SKIF” will be trained with such programs in the Laboratory of Information Technologies JINR.

Information: Joint Institute of Nuclear Research (JINR) is international intergovernmental organization established on the basis of Agreement signed by eleven countries-founders on March 26, 1956, and registered in UN on February 1, 1957. JINR is located in Dubna, Moscow region.

Govorun supercomputer is the world's first hyperconverged supercomputer with 100% liquid cooling. The theoretical peak productivity is about 1 petaflops. It is called after Nikolay Govorun, Director of Laboratory of Computing and Automatizing (now Laboratory of Inofrmation Technologies) JINR in 1988-1989.

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Source: Press-service SRF “SKIF”

Photo: JINR