ClusterVision Delivers ‘Nikola’ to Joint Research Centre (JRC) Petten

AMSTERDAM, August 17, 2021– ClusterVision, a leading provider of high-performance computing clusters (HPC), deep learning and remote service administration (RSA) in Europe, has announced today it has successfully delivered its HPC cluster at Joint Research Centre (JRC) Petten. The cluster is operated by the Nuclear Reactor Safety and Emergency Preparedness Unit.

The cluster will help in providing a significantly safer environment for the workers working in the nuclear plant at Petten (The Netherlands). The new cluster ‘Nikola’ provides JRC with enhanced research capabilities, enabling them to perform more simulations and further improves the accuracy of the results.

The JRC facility in Petten houses a High Flux Reactor and is owned by JRC. It provides 60% of the European demand for isotopes, used in medical diagnosis and the treatment of cancer and contrast agents.

The meticulously designed, developed and installed cluster by ClusterVision helps JRC in meeting their increasing needs of disk space, CPU power and memory to perform their scientific research. Scientists at JRC use the cluster to perform simulations of human radiation exposure. The aim is to minimize or eliminate the impact of the nuclear radiation to the health of the workers at nuclear facilities. While the cluster has been installed at Petten, its services will be used by the European Commission Joint Research Centres throughout Europe. ‘Nikola’ provides a central HPC hub (‘HPC as a Service’) for its sister units located at Ispra in Italy, Karlsruhe in Germany and Seville in Spain.

The cluster was delivered with TrinityX, ClusterVisions’s OpenSource HPC management environment. After carefully evaluating the options, the research centre selected TrinityX – while the old cluster is still managed using Bright Cluster Manager. The Open-Source based TrinityX cluster management solution combines the power of Ansible, BitTorrent technology and the OpenHPC ecosystem to create an Exascale-ready and fully monitored HPC environment. With the use of TrinityX, Petten was able to migrate the applications from the old cluster to the new cluster seamlessly. The migration happened without having to change any pre-existing scripts or recompile any applications. “Our experience with this cluster was extremely positive. We started adding users on it within one month and everything worked out flawlessly. Since day one, the cluster runs without issues”, according to Dr. Igor Simonovski, Scientific Officer at JRC Petten. “We have been working with JRC Petten since 2012 and we’re proud being able assist and contribute to the long-term vision of the European Union. JRC Petten is a multi-disciplinary institute, providing expertise for European policies and innovation in various very urgent scientific fields”, according to Dr. Alex Ninaber, Director HPC, Cloud & Storage Solutions at ClusterVision.

Dr. Simonovski adds that users on this cluster have been extremely happy. “CFX, one of our clients who was reluctant to move to the new cluster ran a speed test on it and observed 60% or more increase in the speed, not making him go back to the older cluster. Also, the prices that we get from ClusterVision are very competitive throughout Europe.”

About JRC Petten

The Joint Research Centre (JRC) is the scientific and technical arm of the European Commission. It is providing the scientific advice and technical know-how to support a wide range of EU policies. The JRC has seven scientific institutes, located at five different sites in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain. The JRC Smart Electricity Systems and Interoperability team is located both in Petten (NL) and Ispra (IT). We, as European Commission’s in-house science service, perform independent scientific research and support EU policymaking on transformations towards smarter and interoperable electricity systems.

About ClusterVision

ClusterVision specialises in high performance computing (HPC) solutions. HPC accelerates scientific discovery. It is with this in mind that ClusterVision provides state-of-the-art, fully tailored HPC clusters to researchers and innovators all over Europe. With in-house software development and a large team of technical specialists (60% technical staff), we work to not just participate in HPC, but to advance the technology behind it. By providing customised solutions accompanied by an exhaustive set of services and trainings, we ensure that our customers can take maximum advantage of HPC technology in order to expand knowledge and advance their respective fields of study.