October 21 (BTA) - The Bulgarian supercomputer Discoverer officially went into operation at the Sofia Tech Park (STP) in the capital on Thursday, STP Supervisory Board Chairman Peter Statev told a news conference.

The Discoverer has achieved performance of 4,5 Petaflops and peak performance of 6 Petaflops. (A Petaflop is one million billion calculations per second.) It has been ranked No. 91 in the TOP 500 chart of the worldТs highest-performing machines.

European Innovation Commissioner Mariya Gabriel said the world-class supercomputer is the result of hard teamwork. What took 365 days to accomplish can now be done in 20 days thanks to the Discoverer. "We are making sure that the capacity of the supercomputer is useful for our industry," the Bulgarian member of the European Commission added. "The big goal is to connect industries, laboratories and universities to avoid multiple public investments in the same thing."

Education and Science Minister Nikolai Denkov commented: "It is a big undertaking, but this is the only way for us to be a modern nation. It would have been just expensive and useless hardware if we did not have skilled staff." LG/VE
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Source: Sofia