MetaCentrum - On the Way from Distributed Computing to Cyber Infrastructure for Research

 

J. Kmuníček1, V. Žáková2, S. Licehammer2, M. Kuba1 and I. Křenková1

 

1CESNET, z.s.p.o., Zikova 4, 160 00 Praha 6, Czech Republic

2Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Botanicka 68a, 620 00 Brno, Czech Republic

kmunicek@ics.muni.cz

 

Keywords: e-Infrastructure, grid, distributed computing, high-throughput computing, high-performance computing

 

Nowadays, the research in any scientific field became truly global and internationalized. The current advances in development, deployment and subsequent support of distributed collaborative environments created a uniform, persistent, pervasive and scalable digital worldwide infrastructure (1). The Czech Republic participates within these activities through the national e-Infrastructure project MetaCentrum (2). MetaCentrum - a CESNET activity - is responsible for building the National Grid and its integration (3) to the related international activities. MetaCentrum operates and manages distributed computing infrastructure consisting of computing and storage resources owned by CESNET as well as resources of co-operative academic centres within the Czech Republic. Through supporting advanced services to all scientific disciplines, MetaCentrum provides added values for end users from many interdisciplinary areas as life science, biomedicine and many others, including naturally structural biologists.

MetaCentrum matured services in the field of virtualisation, security, job scheduling and the utilisation of advanced network features  provided by  the  CESNET2 network are ready to serve for shaping up the new era of structural biology. If you are looking how structural biology domain can substantially benefit from MetaCentrum and worldwide provided production services consider following questions: Would you like to boost your research using the collaboration platform and available tools easing your international research cooperation? Are you hungry for more compute power to speed up your research? Are you looking how to scale up your (bio)molecular systems of interest you currently investigate at atomic details? Do you need to store, access and handle huge amounts of data or archive your research results? You have your specific requests. MetaCentrum has more than corresponding solutions to offer.