VSB-TUO

VSB – Technical University of Ostrava (VSB-TUO) was founded in 1849. It has since grown into a modern higher education and research institution, offering the highest levels of education in technical and economic fields of study. VSB-TUO holds the "HR Excellence in Research" award and belongs to the top technical universities in the Czech Republic, with students studying in BSc, MSc, and PhD degree programmes across seven faculties.

VSB-TUO research activities include artificial intelligence (AI), high-performance computing (HPC), high-performance data analysis (HPDA), and quantum computing (QC) and their application to other scientific fields, industry, and society.

IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center, a university research institute, operates the most powerful HPC systems in the country, including EuroHPC supercomputer Karolina. Moreover, IT4Innovations is the coordinator of the pan-European quantum computing consortium (LUMI-Q).

As part of the CLARA, VSB-TUO will provide computing and data infrastructure with new AI and QC systems and trigger its field of applications in neuroscience. The main focus is on high performance computing, large scale data management and processing, using artificial inteligence and quantum computing.

VSB-TUO contribution to the CLARA project focuses on establishing a testbed for high-performance computing (HPC), artificial intelligence (AI), quantum computing, and distributed data management/processing to support research in neurodegenerative diseases.

VSB-TUO will also contribute to development of algorithms and workflows facilitating artificial intelligence and quantum computing within CLARA research activities.

"Our role is to acquire, operate, and provide the computing infrastructure in our supercomputing centre. At the same time, we will work together to integrate high performance and quantum computing technologies, allowing us to perform the large-scale simulations and analyses necessary to understand the complex processes of neurodegeneration."

"In the first phase, we plan to link the existing supercomputer Karolina and the quantum computer VLQ, operated by the LUMI-Q consortium, together with the computing resources at LRZ. By 2026 at the latest, we are also planning to acquire a completely new CLARA supercomputer specialised in artificial intelligence computing, especially for training deep neural networks, and possibly for quantum computing simulations. This will significantly strengthen the research teams of the CLARA centre in fulfilling their research goals."

"The project will also acquire a high-capacity data repository that will be used to store data during the active phase of processing and as a data source for learning new neural network models. This repository will also become a key element of the distributed data infrastructure that will be used to collect and provide large-scale data within the CLARA Testbed and will be open to other external data sources. The repository will also play the role of an intermediate link between computational capacities and data repositories, enabling the preparation and publication of the centre’s outputs with respect to the principles of open science and FAIR access to data.“