XXI century projects

Development of the Institute - in MLIT projects

On 30 March, an expanded meeting of the Science and Technology Council was held at the Laboratory of Information Technologies. A major information project "Multifunctional information and computing complex" was presented by MLIT Scientific Leader Vladimir Korenkov.

The Multifunctional Information and Computing Complex (MICC) meets the requirements for modern high-performance science and computing complexes: multifunctionality; high performance; task adapted data storage system; high reliability and availability; information security; scalability; software environment configurable for different user groups; high-performance telecommunications and a modern local area network. MICC includes Tier1 and Tier2 grid centres, cloud infrastructure, the HybriLIT platform with the upgraded Govorun supercomputer. As the speaker noted, it is important to develop all its components, to monitor the engineering and network infrastructure. The most important in terms of integration is the development of the DIRAC distributed environment that has been created to integrate various resources, first for the ATLAS experiment, but has already gone beyond collaboration.

Among the expected results of the development of the MICC project, Vladimir Korenkov named the modernization of the engineering infrastructure of the Complex (the immediate task is the reconstruction of the machine room on the fourth floor of MLIT, since the possibilities of the room on the second floor are almost exhausted); development of a computing platform for the NICA project involving the capabilities of the computing centres of the JINR Member States; development of a Tier0 grid cluster (the NICA project demand) for experimental and simulated data storage; expansion of JINR cloud infrastructure; extension of HybriLIT as a hyper-converged software-oriented environment with a hierarchical data storage and processing system, and others.

"At today's meeting of the Science and Technology Council, we announced a major infrastructure project, one of the five major JINR infrastructure projects," Vladimir Vasilievich said for our weekly. "It has already been actually adopted, since it is the basis of our Seven-Year Plan, so today, I spoke about the status of the various components of the MICC, as well as about our immediate, mid- and long-term plans for the development of this Complex and all of its components, starting with the engineering infrastructure, network infrastructure, Tier1 centre for the CMS experiment, Tier2 centre, the cloud infrastructure, the Govorun supercomputer, the software tools that allow us to bring everything together. This is crucial for all major projects, first of all, for the NICA Megascience Project, as well as for others, such as the JINR Neutrino Programme, design of the new reactor NEPTUNE, data processing and analysis for experiments we collaborate with, including the Large Hadron Collider, new American and Chinese projects and so on. It is crucial for us to create an environment that allows us to efficiently process, analyze, store data and provide users with the most modern service.

Today, we discussed two more activities (analogous to R&D, a kind of initiative that may develop into a project or stall) within the framework of the MICC project. This is the JINR digital ecosystem, the digest of which will be released today. It has been put into test operation. This is a very important project for us that allows to gradually digitalize everything. Our goal is to make the work paperless. Here, we meet a lot of tasks, but the most important one is to develop a tool that will allow all our users to have a very convenient means of obtaining various information: administrative, scientific, organizational, any; to make digital requests that we should provide with routing, digital signatures, instead of walking around offices with papers. In addition, the task of analyzing all aspects of the Institute's activities, such as staffing, age, financial, scientific will be addressed that allow us to see the development of our Institute as a whole. Thus, not only JINR staff members and users are provided with a variety of access and convenient services, but also a picture of the development of our Institute is shaped. And we can see the ways to optimize resources, finances and what accents should be made in the development of JINR to keep it in the global trend, so that we use and apply the best personnel and financial models here. In a word, the task is enormous and we are at the very beginning of the way. I think all these aspects of life need to be optimized.

The second activity concerns big data analytics - this is the development of a software and hardware platform to meet these issues. In fact, we have been engaged in a platform for big data analytics, but mainly to solve national problems, including the analysis of the labor market, its relation to higher education. We have gained a lot of experience in another area and today, we would like to apply this experience in addressing issues related to our Institute, such as issues of information security, the use of artificial intelligence tools for analysis. These two activities will support the development of the central information and computing complex. I think they will develop into Institute-wide projects.

Olga TARANTINA