This year Hungary is implementing the biggest super computer development in its history. Worth 2 billion forints, the project will quadruple the capacity of the national super computer technology infrastructure by the end of the year and will significantly increase the domestic research and development potential.

Coordinated by the National Information Infrastructure Development Institute (NIIF), the project “Super Computer Technology in Higher Education” will spend 2 billion forints of EU funding to modernise the two super computers located in Budapest and Debrecen. While the latter machine has been developed since last December, the project in the capital may start in the next few days.

József Pálinkás, President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, said at the inaugural event in Budapest that nearly every field of specialty has witnessed such computer technology needs that he would not have thought of as a physicist even 10 or 20 years ago. The availability of these systems is indispensable for the competitiveness of research institutes.

State Secretary for Infocommunication Vilmos Vályi-Nagy explained that Hungary’s infocommunication infrastructure, which is also outstanding by international standards, was one of the reasons why several global companies have decided in recent years to install their manufacturing and development capacities in Hungary. The world class knowledge of Hungarian researchers can only be exploited by ensuring an appropriate and ever-developing technical environment as “there cannot be domestic research and development or innovation without a modern super computer technology background”.

Speaking of the details, Head of Project Péter Stefán said the overall performance of the national super computer technology will quadruple by the end of the year as the computation capacity will rise from the current 53 to 230 Tflop/s, and the data storage capacity from 2 Pbyte to 7 Pbyte. He added that the use of the super computer technology infrastructure will remain free for all domestic university, academy and institute researchers.

The new system created by the development project will be as powerful in terms of human resources as if each of the 7 billion inhabitants of the world took a computer in their hands and performed roughly 30,000 operations per second at the same time.

By now, using the super computer network has become an indispensable tool for most researchers as they can solve nearly 90 percent of scientific problems with the help of simulations that are run on systems of such capacity. For instance, today a medical researcher examining a particular virus uses a super computer to synthesise antibodies and test their efficiency. As response reactions arrive much sooner than they do in the case of a laboratory test, considerable time and costs can be saved.

(Ministry of National Development)