The proposed SSA has a single participant – the Scientific Computing Laboratory of the Institute of Physics in Belgrade.

The Scientific Computing Laboratory (SCL) is a unit of the Institute of Physics in Belgrade. The Institute was founded in 1961 with a mission to conduct high quality research in the area of physics. The Institute of Physics (IP) has amply fulfilled its mission, and at present contributes more than 10% of the total scientific output of Serbia. With its 170 employees (out of which 70 researchers with PhD degree, 40 researchers with MSc degree, 30 technicians, and 30 administration and support staff), it has constantly ranked among the leading R&D institutions in the region.

In IP it was recognized quite early that usage of modern computer recourses can benefit the research, and that scientific computing has become a tool as vital as experimentation and theory in solving the scientific challenges of tomorrow. A special care was devoted to maintain the IP’s leading position in Serbia in deployment of high performance computing facilities, a process that lead to the founding of SCL.

Apart from SCL several other research organizations will participate in the proposed activities as EU and national networking partners.

EU networking partners:

GRNET – Greece has as its mission to provide high-quality international and national networking services to the Greek Academic & Research institutions and to support Research and Educational activities of the public and private sector. It undertakes initiatives for the coordination of regional programmes, such as the integration of the National Research Networks of South-Eastern Europe - SEEREN and of 3rd Mediterranean countries – EUMEDCONNECT within GÉANT. It is coordinator in several other FP6 projects, such as SEE-GRID, SEE-GRID-2, 6DISS, and SEE-FIRE, and of the regional initiative SEE-FIBER. GRNET played a leading role in the establishment of the Hellas Grid Task Force.

Democritos – Italy is the National Simulation Center of INFM, hosted by SISSA in Trieste. It is a leading Italian research institution, developing various numerical simulations and GRID enabled software, as well as some core middleware parts. Democritos is implementing a distributed virtual laboratory strongly supported by CINECA, the leading Italian super-computing center in Bologna.

University of Oslo – Norwayis Norway’s largest and oldest institution of higher education. It was founded in 1811. Today the University of Oslo has approx. 30,000 students and 4,600 employees. Its researchers are involved in several FP6 projects. Four Nobel Prize winners among the staff also indicate the quality of the research at the University.

Jozef Stefan Institute – Slovenia (JSI) is the leading R&D institution in Slovenia and has maintains high quality professional research at the frontier of knowledge, participating in several dozen running EU Framework Projects. The institute was one of the first to introduce large computing facilities in former Yugoslavia through pooling of resources and the formation of a national computing center. SCL has established scientific collaboration with researchers at JSI via a bilateral project on complex networks, as well as through joint participation in COST action P10. The transfer of JSI expertise in the propagation of information through complex networks to SCL will increase research capacity of SCL and contribute to the objectives of the present SSA proposal.

National networking partners:

University of Belgrade Computing Centre (RCUB) manages the national academic and research communication and information network and coordinates international cooperation and technical network development. At present, more than 150 educational and research institutions are connected to RCUB connecting more than 100.000 individuals. Together with SCL it is a major promoter of GRID initiatives in Serbia. It will contribute to the CX-CMCS proposal through maintaining SCL’s dedicated 1Gbps link, and providing key technical expertise in the networking area.

Astronomical Observatory in Belgrade (AOB) is one of the oldest research institutions in Serbia covering the fields of astrometry and astrophysics. The AOB has a long standing and fruitful collaboration with leading international research institutions with particularly developed regional connections and joint investigations. SCL has helped AOB to develop its computing facilities and to train their administrative staff. AOB’s expertise in the dynamics of near Earth objects will contribute to the proposed CX-CMCS SSA allowing SCL to extend research activities to another important field requiring massive numerical simulations with possible extension to GRID architectures.

IRVAS International, d.o.o. is an innovative hi-tech SME based in the south of Serbia (Nis). It provides hardware and software solutions to its business and academic customer base in Serbia and throughout the region in areas of eGovernment, internet providing, document management software, and system integration. SCL has a long standing and fruitful collaboration with IRVAS in integrating PC clusters and relies on their expertise and in depth knowledge of particular hardware components (motherboards, switching units, etc.). IRVAS will benefit from the proposed SSA by employing a number of skilled young professionals trained at SCL after the duration of the SSA.