National Competence Centre for High-Performance Computing
MAIA – Montenegrin AI Association is a Non-Governmental organization, founded in September 2022 with an ambition to bring together the Montenegrin AI community. Our goal is to popularize Artificial Intelligence related research and spread awareness of its importance in our country, but also encourage our society to join the fast wave of AI innovation in the World. Several NCC Montenegro team members are taking part in this initiative. Check MAIA website for more details at the following link.
HPC NCC Montenegro representatives Sanja Nikolic and Luka Filipovic organized initial meeting with colleagues from NCC Luxembourg (representatives of Luxinnovation – National Innovation Agency; LuxProvide – in charge of long-term operations of national supercomputer – MeluXina, and University of Luxembourg – providing HPC educational programs and training courses) and discussed cooperation possibilities and best practices sharing in the areas of industry engagement, MeluXina features/access opportunities and training programs.
With regard to industry cooperation, colleagues from NCC Luxemburg shared their experience and expertise related to business users engagement and MeluXina onboarding process, focusing on HPC needs and benefits, compute-intensive workloads, industry-centric use cases and business cases, supported by dedicated sales & engineering teams. Petascale supercomputer, MeluXina is enabling leading research (non-commercial access through Euro HPC Access Calls) and industrial applications (65% of dedicated resources), with very high security and data protection standards highly appreciated by their commercial users. University of Luxemburg is organizing HPC School and HPC-related Master and Doctoral programs, covering various training needs from beginners access to advanced lectures, on its own and MeluXina supercomputing infrastructure. They also successfully manage HPC community of around 1000 users/ 200 newcomers per year.
NCC Montenegro representatives provided short introduction on main activities and achievements. Based on productive meeting, industry potential discussion and elaborated skills development programs, NCC teams agree on further alignment on HPC+ Topics & Trainings of joint interest, in the context of EuroCC2 plans and 2023 roadmap.
This project aims to develop effective software for decision-making support, i.e. to facilitate the business process of entities in the food business in our country, as well as competent authorities, and from the aspect of support and more effective strengthening and ensuring of food safety and research of disease outbreaks.
Researchers from the FoodHub CoE and HPC NCC Montenegro work on the FoodDecide project to identify the most important data necessary for software development such as visualisation of the food value chain.
Researchers from the Institute of Hydrometeorology and Seismology, department for numerical weather analysis and prediction, visited NCC Montenegro and University of Donja Gorica. Mr Angel Marcev and mr Aleksandar Marcev met with our team to discuss the next steps in the collaboration. The discussion was about the results achieved with the simulated weather data prediction models and we made plans for future work based on HPC simulations. We discussed possibilities of usage of weather prediction with higher resolution that could be used for smaller areas for smart agriculture, energy and similar domains and possibilities of machine learning usage on data with meteorological conditions.
FF4EuroHPC Experiment 1003 focused on AI/ML Based Computer Vision for Next Generation Poultry Farms was presented at the OC1 Workshop today. We discussed the project objectives, experiment approach, the benefits of the use of HPC and Deep Learning. Learn more about FF4EuroHPC project and HPC experiments at https://www.ff4eurohpc.eu/.
The fourth workshop took place on October 19th, 2022 and included presentations of the experiments related to Maintenance, Agriculture & Assets Management Sectors. University of Donja Gorica and NCC Montenegro were part of the experiment presentation related to the use of HPC to develop AI/ML computer vision solutions for smart agriculture.
As part of the Erasmus+ VIRAL project, a training was held at the Chamber of Economy of Montenegro in order to promote digital transformation and the application of ICT in agriculture. Representatives from University of Donja Gorica prepared a presentation entitled “Digital transformation in agriculture” as part of the Digital Day, on Friday, July 22, 2022. starting at 1 p.m., in the premises of the Chamber of Economy of Montenegro. As part of the presentation, an overview of the activities of the VIRAL project was given. The presentation covered foundations of the process of digital transformation and the application of ICT solutions in agriculture. During the presentation and discussions, other project relevant to ICT and digital transformation in agriculture were featured including EuroCC and AIMHiGH projects. This topic is fully in line with Montenegrin Smart Specialisation Strategy (S3 Montenegro), and we concluded that another similar workshop needs to be organized in Fall of 2022.
EuroCC and NCC Montenegro were featured in “Elektroprivreda”, a magazine published by the national power company EPCG. The magazine published the interview with prof. dr Mladen Kezunovic that was done during his visit to UDG and his invited lecture “AI in Energy Sector”. This effort was part of our engagement of the industry to promote AI and HPC applications and EPCG is one of the major stakeholders in energy sector in Montenegro.
