At the closing event of the “Supercomputing in higher education” project in Budapest on Wednesday, Ákos Kara, Secretary of State for Infocommunications and Consumer Protection, said that the largest supercomputing development in Hungary has been completed, and that this will aid scientific cooperation between higher education and industry.
The Secretary of State said that a high-performance supercomputing system has been operating in Hungary for 14 years; the capability of this infrastructure is astounding, as it can rapidly process and store a huge amount of data, enabling it to satisfy the essential requirements of scientific research. He added that supercomputing equipment can be used in every field of research.
He emphasised that the current project is substantially contributing to Hungary’s increase in competitiveness, because without modern infrastructure Hungarian innovation is impossible. He also said that this development represents a major step forward in making Hungary one of Europe’s most competitive countries. He added that the system under development was among the top 500 in the world.
Mr. Kara said that the project which was launched in 2013 had been realised in two locations – in Debrecen and in Budapest – and its aim has been to increase the efficiency of Hungarian higher education and its supporting research and development. He pointed out that this is of key significance, because university research centres are important for stable economic development.
Miklós Nagy, director of the National Information Infrastructure Development Institute (Nemzeti Információs Infrastruktúra Fejlesztési Intézet – NIIF) emphasised that the system created with the now completed development has made Hungary capable of competing with any other European country, and has taken the country to the forefront in Europe.
He said that, with the success gained so far and continuously growing knowledge of the field, the aim is to make it possible for Hungary to really possess a system which has one of the largest capacities in Europe.
As part of the “Supercomputing in Higher Education” project, Hungarian supercomputing capacity is quadrupling, thanks to almost HUF two billion in support from the European Union and the Hungarian state. Supercomputing has become indispensable to most researchers, because they can complete almost 90% of scientific tasks using simulations run on such large capacity systems.
Realisation of the project means that the Hungarian system has a capacity equal to the seven billion people on Earth simultaneously using calculators, each performing about thirty thousand operations per second.