30 years of the Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Center

2023-04-17

30 years of the Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Center

On April 17, 1993, the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center was established by the resolution of the College of Rectors of the City of Poznan. A few more months later, the written declarations turn into reality – in November of the same year, the PSNC will be affiliated with the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences and officially begin its activities.

The main goal of establishing PSNC was to coordinate the implementation of the Metropolitan Area Network and supercomputers in Poznan by the units represented in the College of Rectors of the City of Poznan. In the following years, the activities of PSNC, successfully led to the pilot launch of the national POL-34 network, and then to the creation of a program to build a national Polish Optical Internet network under the PIONIER program. Subsequent structural projects entitled PLATON, NewMAN, MAN-HA and 100net provided funding for the development of the network at the national level and the implementation of advanced services and applications for its users.

Starting from the launch of the first supercomputer CRAY Y-MP EL, PSNC has steadily developed high-performance computing services, which were ranked among the 500 most powerful machines in the world for a total of 10 years. As a result, since 2008, PSNC has represented Poland in the PRACE consortium, and since then Polish scientists have the opportunity to use the most powerful supercomputers in Europe. Launched in 2015, the Eagle supercomputer was on the TOP-500 list for the first four years. In addition to its use for scientific computing, it is the foundation for the activities of the PSNC-Huawei Innovation Center. In February 2022, the Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Center joined the IBM Quantum Network, thus creating the first IBM Quantum Innovation Center in Central and Eastern Europe, located in Poznań.

Competency development and increase in the number of staff (in 2000 there were more than 60 people working at PSNC, and in 2023 already nearly 500), as well as modern infrastructure, allowed, starting from 2001, to successfully acquire projects in competitions of European framework programs as well as national research programs. To date, PSNC has already implemented more than 230 such projects.