Jubilees

Captain of a ship called MLIT

On 26 September, the 70th anniversary
of the Scientific Leader V.V.Korenkov
was celebrated at the Laboratory of Information Technologies.

The atmosphere of the event was already created in the foyer of the conference hall, in which live music was played, posters with a photo chronicle of the life path of the hero of the day were displayed.

The scientific part of the seminar included reports by T.A.Strizh "From the mainframe to computing for megascience", V.A.Ilyin "Grid technologies in Russia", S.Campana "On JINR's participation in the WLCG project", A.B.Degtyarev "Collaboration with St. Petersburg State University", E.N.Cheremisina "Collaboration with the Dubna State University.

"Today is a wonderful, sunny day and a significant day in the life of the laboratory and the entire Institute - the jubilee of Vladimir Vasilievich Korenkov," MLIT Director S.V.Shmatov opened the seminar.

"Your name is already in the history of the Institute, a stone in its foundation," JINR Director G.V.Trubnikov started his congratulations on behalf of the entire Joint Institute and on his own behalf. "It is directly associated for several generations with the successes of science that develops in our Institute and world centres. You have only one entry in your work book - what more could a person wish for? You are involved in the establishment of this laboratory, in the development of a wonderful team that like no other laboratory, represents a harmonious combination of generations.

G.V.Trubnikov presented the hero of the day with the medal of the Order "For Services to the Fatherland" II degree, the decree on awarding which was signed by the President of the Russian Federation back in 2022 and added personal impressions from meeting Vladimir Vasilievich: "You are an amazingly open, contactable person. When I arrived at JINR in 1997, I met you at the JINR UC. No one else had such democracy as you had in your lectures. We all wanted to go to work at LIT, although we were already assigned to different laboratories. This is a God-given talent - to charge with energy, to captivate with your idea and may it not fade away in you for many more years!"

The report by T.A.Strizh had a second, unofficial title: "30 years at the IT helm." In it, in 15 minutes, she was able to vividly and colorfully outline the history of the long journey of LIT headed by Vladimir Vasilievich. Comparing the laboratory staff with an orchestra, she noticed that with such a conductor as Vladimir Vasilievich, he had never been out of tune for 30 years.

Vyacheslav Anatolievich Ilyin (NRC "Kurchatov Institute")

V.A.Ilyin (National Research Centre "Kurchatov Institute") highlighted the basic stages of the quarter-century history of the development of the grid in Russia in his speech. At the end of the 1990s, they faced the issue on the need for computing for the LHC. By this time, US universities developed their own concept of grid computing, yet CERN decided not to duplicate it, but to mobilize the efforts of the JINR Member States and associated countries of the European centre. "The NICA project goes through a similar period today. Soon it will make all its money on the experiment and it will need to do something with computing, money is needed, yet there are people, experience and effective solutions." V.A.Ilyin spoke about the history of the development of Tier2 and Tier1 centres in JINR and Russia, noting that only one Tier2 centre in our country, particularly, in Dubna is also involved in science and this is very valuable. He recalled that the decision to build the Tier1 centre was made by V.G.Kadyshevsky and A.N.Sisakyan and the contribution of I.A.Golutvin is invaluable. Tier1 in Dubna is the largest Tier1 centre in the world, rivaling the centre in FNAL. "But the Americans have no future experiment, yet in Dubna, there is NICA and all the experience that Vladimir Vasilievich has gained here with his team is a very serious contribution to the project."

Simon Campana, Head of the WLCG project at CERN, gave several examples of successful cooperation with MLIT JINR in his video report, noting the personal contribution of V.V.Korenkov. He described the more than 20-year tradition of holding international conferences and youth schools in the laboratory as very important that was not interrupted during the difficult times of the pandemic.

V.V.Korenkov devotes a lot of time to cooperation with universities, work in dissertation councils, noted S.V.Shmatov and gave the floor to scientists from two universities, St. Petersburg State University and Dubna University.

A.B.Degtyarev noted that Vladimir Vasilievich devotes a lot of time to young people, there are always many young people around him and surprisingly, he has enough time for everyone. And cooperation with the universities of St. Petersburg started a long time ago, even under M.G.Meshcheryakov, N.N.Govorun and V.G.Kadyshevsky and this cooperation is very diverse. The students that come here for just two weeks find their life's work, those who have not been interested in anything before "light up." In recent years, Vladimir Vasilievich has raised the level of LIT from a laboratory aimed at providing experiments to a completely different height. "I have spoken in this hall more than once at conferences and dissertation councils, but I have not seen such a number of people as at the seminar, even at plenary sessions of international conferences on the grid. I am very glad that Vladimir Vasilievich has such a huge number of friends and supporters."

E.N.Cheremisina emphasized that the hero of the day has been working at the Dubna University for 25 years and the university itself will turn 30 next year. First, bachelors were trained in the department established under his leadership, later, a master's programme was developed that has already been updated several times. Five years ago, on the initiative of Vladimir Vasilievich, the international school "Big Data Analytics" was developed, where specialists for JINR projects, as well as for other companies in Dubna, Moscow and Russia are trained.

In the second part of the seminar there were many more speakers. They congratulated the hero of the day on behalf of the staff of the Institute's laboratories, the national communities of JINR and the national academies of sciences, universities and institutes of Armenia, Belarus, Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, Russia, Romania and Uzbekistan. Jan Busha presented the hero of the day with a silver medal from the Technical University of Kosice (Slovakia). V.D.Kekelidze, Head of the VBLHEP delegation, mentioned that "nothing develops as dynamically as the IT sector and V.V.Korenkov is always one step ahead. If the captain does not know which harbor to sail to, no wind will be favorable to him. Vladimir Vasilievich always knows which harbor to sail to!" S.V.Shmatov added that the contribution of the hero of the day to the CMS collaboration is invaluable and without his participation the Higgs boson would not have been discovered.

The VBLHEP delegation is congratulating the hero of the day

Acting Rector of the Dubna University A.S.Denikin noted: "You have developed an excellent team around you that we can rely on when organizing many projects. Vladimir Vasilievich, while dealing with complex things, remains very simple and easy to communicate." Gheorghe Adam emphasized that the development of IT in Romania in the last 20 years would have been impossible without the invaluable support of MLIT and personally, V.V.Korenkov.

There were no fewer congratulating people on the Internet. Rudolf Pose said in his address: "In my opinion, your contribution to the development and support of the Institute's powerful computing base is invaluable. I am glad that you became director and have headed the laboratory for many years." Andrey Kirianov (St. Petersburg) wished: "You are an example for us of how to work in this industry. And since something constantly changes in it, I wish that in the future, you will continue to find interesting topics for yourself and move LIT and the entire segment forward." Vladimir Kitov (Plekhanov Russian University of Economics) went on air with congratulations from the SORUCOM-2023 conference in Nizhny Novgorod, from which the hero of the day himself had returned the day before. And afterwards, the celebration moved from the conference hall to the foyer, congratulations continued from guests and laboratory employees, in the form of poems generated by the ChatGPT neural network, or ditties of their own composition, famously performed by young laboratory employees.

Musical congratulation from young MLIT staff members

Happy anniversary, Vladimir Vasilievich!

Olga TARANTINA,
photo by Elena PUZYNINA