The National Grid Infrastructure is operated by MetaCentrum, CESNET department responsible for coordinating and managing grid activities in the Czech Republic on behalf of the Czech NGI. Long-term goal of the MetaCentrum project is **operation and coordination of distributed computing and data storage infrastructure** in the Czech Republic as a dynamic network of resources across different locations and administrative domains, as a part of the pan-European infrastructure built in the framework of the [[https://www.egi.eu|EGI project]], accompanied by an appropriate support environment and continual **expansion of available computational capacities**. The main aim of the project is the constitution of a virtual computer that allows effective utilization of installed facilities and **solving tasks whose memory and/or CPU requirements exceeds possibility of individual single computing centers**. MetaCentrum structure is flexible enough, any academic subject within the Czech Republic is able to fully **integrate** any **computing capacities** in current MetaCentrum infrastructure getting significant higher computing power for research.

MetaCentrum **supports the research projects** in many research disciplines, to enable researchers easily share a range of national resources: compute, storage, data, instruments, and ease their efforts to attain a global dimension. Simultaneously MetaCentrum activity deals with necessary **research and development** to ensure optimal functionality, security and performance of the infrastructure through participation in similar international projects.

===== Important information =====
  * [[join|I want to become a member]]
  * [[about#advantages|Advantages of the NGI]]
  * [[services#certificate|I need a certificate]]
  * [[faq|Documentation and help]]
  * [[https://metavo.metacentrum.cz|MetaVO web page]]
  * [[services#cloud|MetaCloud]]
  * [[resources#hardware|List of HW]]

===== Map of HW centres =====
{{:czech-republic-map-with-orange-data-center-locatio.jpg?900|Map of MetaCentrum hardware centres across Czech Republic}}

MetaCentrum participates in the [[https://www.egi.eu|European Grid Initiative (EGI.eu)]] and the major InSPIRE project. The aim of this participation is to enable coherent electronic access for researchers to all computational and data based resources and facilities in the Czech Republic, Europe and eventually also globally. MetaCentrum is actively **involved in many** other **international Grid projects**.