Homepage for UWB Portal News

He advises colleagues on where to begin and provides MetaCentrum with feedback on what his field needs, such as which tutorials are missing or which software users are interested in. “At first glance, MetaCentrum can be a complex environment for a newcomer, and explaining everything remotely does not always work well. That is why it is useful to have someone directly at the workplace who knows how to use it,” said Michal Kaufman from the Department of Material Science and Technology, who also works at the Regional Technological Institute of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at UWB. Anyone from the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen, as well as people from outside the university, can contact him. The ambassador role is voluntary and depends on the time available to the individual experts.

At MetaCentrum, Kaufman designs new materials, particularly materials for hydrogen storage, and predicts how they degrade over time. To do this, he uses quantum-mechanical simulations, which describe the behavior of electrons in materials, as well as machine learning, in which models learn from data. In both cases, the aim is to predict a material’s properties before it is actually manufactured. Such calculations, however, are not completed in a matter of minutes. They may run for dozens of hours and, in extreme cases, for as long as two weeks.

While laptops and even powerful workstations are no longer sufficient for such tasks, MetaCentrum can handle them without difficulty. A researcher submits a job from their laptop, and MetaCentrum’s scheduler determines, based on available capacity, when and on which servers it will run. Once the calculation is complete, the researcher downloads the results back to their laptop. “Calculations of a certain complexity simply cannot be handled by individual computers anymore. They require dozens of processor cores working simultaneously or powerful graphics cards for training artificial intelligence models. And dozens or even hundreds of such calculations often run in parallel, for example, when we are screening thousands of candidates for a new material,” Kaufman explained.

Kaufman also brings the calculations he uses in his research into teaching in the follow-up Master’s program at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, where he teaches courses on computational methods for predicting material properties. His message to students and colleagues at the faculty who want to move their calculations or data beyond the limits of a laptop is simple: he will be happy to help them take their first steps. In the MetaCentrum list of ambassadors, Michal Kaufman is the only one who lists computational materials engineering as his field; bioinformatics is the most common discipline among the ambassadors.

MetaCentrum is a network of computing clusters, i.e., groups of interconnected servers located at universities and research institutes across the Czech Republic. It is operated by CESNET and forms part of the national e-INFRA CZ e-infrastructure, which provides the Czech research community with computing power, data storage, and network services. MetaCentrum was established in 1996 and has since provided the research community with free access to its computing resources. The University of West Bohemia in Pilsen has been a long-standing member and also contributes its own Alfrid computing cluster, which was upgraded in 2025.