Discussion of distributed computing and grid technologies at MLIT JINR

News, 03 July 2023

Today, an international conference “Distributed Computing and Grid Technologies in Science and Education” (GRID’2023) has started at the Laboratory of Information Technologies JINR. The main aim of the event is to discuss the current grid operation and the future role of distributed and cloud computing, HPC, Big Data, etc. Its participants will share the latest results in the field of distributed computing and grid technologies, hold two workshops and a round table on the creation of RDIG-M. For the first time, a student scientific session will take place at the GRID conference.

The 10th conference is being held in a mixed format. It has brought together more than 270 scientists from leading scientific and educational centres in Bulgaria, Egypt, Mexico, Moldova, Russia, Serbia, the Czech Republic, Switzerland, and others.

JINR Director Grigory Trubnikov opened the conference with his report, in which he introduced the audience to the scientific directions and main projects of JINR.

Welcoming the participants of the conference, MLIT JINR Scientific Leader Vladimir Korenkov highlighted that any large physical project included a computer hybrid infrastructure then. “It is impossible to imagine a modern megascience project without distributed computing. Therefore, one of the tasks of the GRID conferences is to discuss the idea of creating the RDIG-M infrastructure,” Vladimir Korenkov underlined. The RDIG-M distributed infrastructure (Russian Data-Intensive Grid Certificate Authority) for processing, storing, and analysing data from large scientific projects will be a topic for a wide discussion at the round table during this conference.

In addition, Vladimir Korenkov informed the participants of the event about the status of the JINR Multifunctional Information and Computing Complex, its recent modernisation and plans for its development. Over the past year, specialists improved the central processing unit (CPU) and the storage system of the Govorun Supercomputer. Moreover, MLIT has recently received five new servers, each of which has eight graphics processing units. All this opens up new opportunities in solving modern problems, especially those related to deep machine learning.

In addition to 32 plenary and 131 sectional reports on the topics of the conference, the GRID’2023 programme includes two workshops. MLIT, FLNP, and a MBIR Consortium jointly organised one of them aimed at the modelling and creation of digital twins for reactors of a new generation. An LRB team together with Serbian colleagues will hold the second workshop on computing for radiobiology and medicine. The round table with the participation of many representatives from universities will also take place to discuss the development of IT education.

A new event in the conference programme will be a student scientific session, at which students, who have been selected at the JINR Spring School of Information Technologies, will present reports on the results of their work.

The working languages of the conference are English and Russian. The conference will last until 7 July.