Research and development programmes

In-house research and development

e-Infrastructure research and development are primarily driven by the requirements of the e-infrastructure evolution and its flexible advanced use:

• Algorithm development and the , with specific emphasis on parallel and distributed computing environment and the use of accelerators (GP-GPU currently, Xeon Phi).
• e-Infrastructure configuration and authorisation, including complex virtual (cloud) environments for critical information infrastructures, such as existing Cybernetic Proving Ground (research, development, and training in cybersecurity), or virtualised testbeds to support simulation of large systems (e.g., smart cities, energy distribution network etc.).
• Work with extensive datasets—this is a recurring scheme in many RI’s collaborations, ranging from security, through smart energy to life sciences)—and the recent introduction of generic “big data” analysis techniques as a new research focus.
• Job and task scheduling (in collaboration with CESNET)
• Security of large distributed (in collaboration with CESNET) e-infrastructures, in particular, authentication and authorization in the distributed environment, general cybersecurity.

High Performance Computing and Big Data

Infrastructure

Interdisciplinary collaborations

Besides running computing and storage resources, the CERIT-SC role lies in a close collaboration with end users and research teams from many research areas.

CERIT-SC users do not act only as service consumers, but mainly as partners in research and production application of its results. Groups of employees and CERIT-SC students together with members of other institutions are working on specific problems of user communities that require non-trivial e-infrastructure support.

CERIT-SC is usually responsible for the e-infrastructure and data processing related part of the research, thus allowing researchers and their teams to focus on and progress more quickly with their own research. For example:

• design and implementation of an e-infrastructure efficiently supporting the intended research activities,
• design, development and optimization of various algorithms or computation methods,
• development of tools required to deal with a particular research problem (simulation, modelling, visualization, etc.).

Centre CERIT-SC tightly cooperates with the Faculty of Informatics as well as other parts of the Masaryk University and other universities. It targets specifically into integrating master and graduate students. PhD study consultants work in the centre, helping students to integrade tightly into relevant research areas, their results immediately applied in the centre itself as well as other places.

20 research partners expressed their interest in the CERIT-SC environment and services by signing Memorandum of Understanding agreements. CERIT-SC became a partner of several large national and international projects, like ELIXIR, BBMRI, West-Life, ...