Grid technology has been used in science and research for more than a decade and represents a solution to many complex computational problems or experiments. The first cluster in Slovenia was deployed in 2004. With the establishment of the Slovenian Initiative for a National Grid (SLING), of which ARNES is one of the founding members, we have started to connect organizations’ computer centres and users into a national grid network. Today it consists of eight clusters encompassing nearly 10,000 cores. There is no lack of challenges. Differing researchers’ and projects’ needs demand constant adjustment of the implementation environment and agile establishment of centres with various computational resources. SLING has thus been directing development in the direction of a unified agile architecture which will combine cloud, grid and HPC cluster resources. In this lecture we will present the future goals of the Slovenian initiative and several examples of how our cluster has been used in research and education (FRI).

Barbara Krašovec (ARNES) is a systems administrator at ARNES, Slovenian National Research and Education Network. She specialises in the administration and maintenance of virtualised resources, distributed computing clusters, grid networks and grid information systems. She is the systems administrator for SLING Network, Slovenian Initiative for National Grid, a part of EGI, and has been taking part in the EGI-Inspire infrastructure project since 2010.

Matevž Markovič (student) is an interdisciplinary computer science and mathematics studies student at the Faculty of Information and Computer Science and the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Ljubljana. He is an enthusiastic mathematician with an excellent grasp of computing and is keen to improve and enhance his knowledge by testing various theories and mathematical problems and participating in various mathematical/computing projects such as OEIS (On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences).