The 10th anniversary of IT cluster Isabella in Srce

The celebration was organized in University IT Center Srce where the representatives of current and former Ministry of Science, Education and Sport met the users of Isabella and the IT experts from Srce.

Among others, there was dr.sc Tome Anticic from Rudjer Boskovic Institute, who was the leader of the DataGrid project in 2002. There was also prof.dr.sc. Robert Manger from the Faculty of Science, University of Zagreb present at the event. He was the assistant to the Minister of Science when the cluster was founded. Among the guests there was also dr.sc. Darko Babic, the first user of Isabella, Ruzica Vucic, the head of the department in the Ministry of Science, Education and Sport who is in charge of national IT infrastructure, dr. sc. ZoranBekic, the head of Srce, mr.sc. Damir Danijel Zagar, the leader of the Center for grid and advanced technologies in Srce and DobrisaDobrenic, the head of the Sector for IT Systems in Srce and the leader of DataGrid and clustering center in Srce.

The first cluster was called Dgrid and it was built in Srce in January 2002 for the needs of projects of the Ministry of Science and Technology. It had 8 one-processor units and the cluster distribution Rocks. The aim of the project was to join the European project DataGrid which was started and led by CERN. The network of IT resources for analyzing and processing of large amounts of data in scientific research within LHC experiments should have been built.

The same cluster, called IT cluster Isabella was made available for academic community so that Croatian experts can take part in top scientific projects. The aim was also to motivate them to use clustering technologies and to develop parallel algorithms and models in IT branches of numerous basic and applied sciences.

Today cluster Isabella consists of 48 units, 240 CPU processors, 796 CPU processor units, 4 GPU processors, 1.8 TB of working memory and 15 TB of local disc space. It is the strongest computer in Croatia and as the common resource of all the scientists in Croatia it enables the demanding data processing within many scientific research projects financed by the Ministry of Science, Education and Sport. This cluster is being used by 58 projects at the moment