OPERAS welcomes Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center

We are glad to welcome Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center as a new ordinary member of the OPERAS community in 2024.

Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center (PSNC), affiliated to the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences, is an internationally known node of the European Research Area in the field of IT infrastructure of science and an important R&D center in the field of information and communication technologies (ICT). As a development centre of e-Infrastructure, PSNC designed and built the Metropolitan Network POZMAN, High Performance Computing Center and the national broadband network PIONIER, which is maintained and still developed by PSNC.

Projects developed at PSNC include cooperation with almost a thousand units from over 60 countries in the world, on six continents. All projects are focused on IT technology and concern new generation networks, grids, portals, digital libraries, IT energy efficiency, climate, weather, air quality, new sources of energy, digital humanities, personalized medicine, intelligent agriculture, industry 4.0, astronomy, bioinformatics, Big Data analysis, artificial intelligence, New Media, education, Smart City, cyber security. The list of areas of activity in which PSNC undertakes work is constantly expanding, providing an important example of taking up new technological challenges.

PSNC provides access to a world-class e-Infrastructure for the scientific community, a specific research and development environment – digital science – for “proof of concept” projects, prototyping or large-scale pilot projects. Supercomputing Center offers a wide range of computing services, access to virtual servers, cloud services, while allowing for fast and scalable data management.

PSNC also co-creates research infrastructure services from projects belonging to the Polish Roadmap for Research Infrastructures. DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities), ERIHS.pl (European Research Infrastructure for Heritage Science) and OPERAS-PL can be mentioned here as an example.

The activities that facilitate scholarly communication include but are not limited to:

• Platforms and services for data discovery that support scholarly communication: PSNC is involved in the development of various platforms that improve and stimulate open scholarly communication. For example PSNC is involved in developments of  FBC (Polish data aggregator of scientific and cultural heritage content) SSH Open Marketplace (tools, services and workflows for SSH), RoHub platform (research object management, DMPs, etc.) as well as Dariah Inspire (a platform for dissemination of research activities in digital humanities in Poland).
• Digital Repositories and Open Access Platforms: PSNC develops software for digital repositories that facilitate access to academic publications, data, and other resources, supporting open access and transparency in research. For instance a CoreTrustSeal-certified Digital Repository of Scientific Institutes, used by 26 institutes from Polish Academy of Sciences, is running on PSNC infrastructure.
• Research Data Infrastructures: PSNC participates in national and European projects and initiatives (such as EOSC) to develop infrastructures for storing and managing large datasets. This enables researchers to collaborate across borders and disciplines, leveraging high-performance computing resources to process and analyze data. For instance PSNC is one of the nodes for storing data in the context of LOFAR telescope (https://science.astron.nl/telescopes/lofar/access-to-lofar-data/lofar-data-archive/).
• Digital Preservation: To support long-term access to digital scholarly outputs, PSNC provides preservation solutions and services that ensure data and publications remain available and usable over time, protecting them from loss or obsolescence, and helping institutions to archive and access their knowledge.

The activities of PSNC within DARIAH infrastructure could be highly correlated with OPERAS ideas. As an example, it is worth mentioning:

a) collecting and providing data in accordance with the FAIR principles

b) contextualization of data

c) interactive data processing and mining

d) space-time visualizations, digital reconstructions, etc.

PSNC also creates opportunities to exchange the information between the researches from the Social Sciences and Humanities by creating tools for generating knowledge, establishing communities or consolidating the infrastructure base. The most important activities are:

a) generating tools for creating repositories, libraries and other digital platforms used for efficient data collection and long-term data storage (for example software package DInGO)

b) national aggregator of culture and science data (FBC)

c) dedicated tools for various humanities fields

d) cooperation on literary studies database

e) cooperation on tools for scientific information and dissemination of literary studies knowledge

PSNC, which is worth mentioning, is also a member of the Social Sciences and Humanities Open Cluster. Consequently, the various activities related to the open science are the domain of interest of PSNC.

 “Joining OPERAS is an important step in our efforts to advance research infrastructures for the social sciences and humanities. We are excited to collaborate closely with OPERAS and actively engage in Special Interest Groups related to ICT. Supporting scholarly communication has been an important element in our longstanding activities related to cultural heritage and digital humanities. We look forward to fostering synergies and gaining valuable insights from the collaborations that will emerge in the future.” said Tomasz Parkoła, Head of Digital Libraries and Knowledge Platforms Department at PSNC.

PSNC  will contribute to the Tools and Platforms Special Interest Group.

We are looking forward to further collaborations.

OPERAS 

OPERAS is the Research Infrastructure supporting open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) in the European Research Area. Its mission is to coordinate and federate resources in Europe to efficiently address the scholarly communication needs of European researchers in the field of SSH. OPERAS’ aim is to make Open Science a reality for research in the SSH and achieve a scholarly communication system where knowledge produced in the SSH benefits researchers, academics, students and more generally the whole society across Europe and worldwide, without barriers.

If you want to know more, contact us and find more information on joining OPERAS here: https://operas-eu.org/about/want-to-know-more/want-to-join-operas/