Eastern Europe’s most powerful supercomputer arrives in Bulgaria
The new EuroHPC supercomputer has been fully delivered and assembled at Bulgaria’s Sofia Tech Park, Bulgaria, French IT service and consulting company Atos announced. The machine, built upon Atos’ new BullSequana XH2000 architecture, is expected to start operating in July.
“This supercomputer will provide users with a peak performance of 6 petaFLOPS computing power, which means that it will be possible to process extremely large volumes of data in real time and obtain results quickly. This machine will benefit Europe, and Bulgaria in particular, and will bring us one step closer to our ambition to make Europe a world leader in high-performance computing,” commented Jaroslav Vojtěch, Head of HPC & Big Data at Atos in the Czech Republic.
4.4 Petaflops per second
The supercomputer will be able to execute more than 4.4 Petaflops or 4 million billion calculations per second, bringing Bulgaria’s processing performance up to 6 Petaflops. It will be the most powerful supercomputer in Eastern Europe, helping the region’s and Europe’s development of scientific research and providing access to state-of-the-art HPC infrastructure to users from the scientific research community, industry and the public sector.
It will serve the development of scientific, public and industrial applications in many fields, including biotech, pharmacy, molecular dynamics and mechanics, quantum chemistry and biochemistry, artificial intelligence, personalized medicine, bioengineering, meteorology, and the fight against climate change.
Supporting European researchers, industry and public users
“In just a few months, a new EuroHPC supercomputer will increase the computing power available in Bulgaria and in Europe as a whole. Over the last months, supercomputers have been critical in developing vaccines against COVID-19. This new top-of-the-range system is the sixth EuroHPC supercomputer to be contracted and will further support European researchers, industry and public users to develop optimized solutions to current complex challenges in sectors like health, energy, agriculture or material design,” stated Anders Dam Jensen, the Executive Director of the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU), which selected the machine alongside the consortium “Petascale Supercomputer Bulgaria” (PetaSC-Bulgaria) whose leading partner is Sofia Tech Park.
Peter Statev, the Chairman of the Supervisory Board at Sofia Tech Park JSC and the legal representative of PetaSC-Bulgaria, explained: “The challenge that the ‘Petascale supercomputer – Bulgaria’ Consortium faces is to strengthen and develop the partnership between the industry, the leading universities and the Bulgarian Academy of Science. An additional task is the training of specialists skilled in the technology application into the problems worked on by the industry in the next 5 to 10 years. Last but not least, is the effective work and the knowledge and technology transfer with the other centers, part of the European HPC network.”
The project is being co-financed by the Republic of Bulgaria and EuroHPC JU, with their joint investment totaling EUR 11.5 m.
The supercomputer in Bulgaria will be complemented by four other supercomputers: LuxProvide, Luxembourg, IZUM, Slovenia, IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center, Czech Republic, and Munho Advanced Computing Centre (MACC), Portugal.
