Members of the Department of Information Technologies Ing. Jan Masner, Ph.D. and Ing. Jan Pavlík visited the international research organization ICRISAT (International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-arid Tropics) in Hyderabad, India, at the end of September 2019.

During the visit, negotiations were held regarding the articles, projects and other possibilities of cooperation. Furthermore, the results of the cooperation so far were presented to their possible users.

The Department of Information Technology has carried out calculations simulating the cultivation of sorghum in India. For this, high-performance computers of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and big data processing were used. A special software was created that generated input files for the simulation SW APSIM. The simulations were subsequently run in batches and processed in parallel on 7 computing stations. Simulations were performed for 311 regions of India, 3 soil types and more than 20 other parameters. In total, there were more than 4.5 million simulations, which generated more than 15 TB of data. The results were analyzed and the most valuable simulations were selected based on statistical analyses. The key data are then clearly visualized in the following map. 

Visualizations can be viewed at maps.csita.cz

wp members also attended a SW APSIM simulation workshop led by one of the developers, Greg McLean from The University of Queensland, Australia.

At the end of the visit, the results (visualization) were presented to a gathering of groundnut breeders from all over India, and the possibilities of creating similar calculations for groundnut cultivation were discussed.