Bulgarian World-Class Supercomputer Goes into Operation
NW 14:35:31 21-10-2021
LG1433NW.108
108 ECONOMY - SUPERCOMPUTER - LAUNCH amplified
Bulgarian World-Class
Supercomputer Goes into
Operation
Sofia, October 21 (BTA) - The Bulgarian supercomputer Discoverer was officially inaugurated at the Sofia Tech Park (STP) in the capital city on Thursday, STP Supervisory Board Chairman Peter Statev told a news conference.
Discoverer has achieved performance of 4.5 Petaflops (i.e. it can execute 4.5 million billion operations per second) and peak performance of 6 Petaflops. The new petascale machine is ranked 91st on the TOP500 world's most powerful supercomputer systems list. Its design is based on the BullSequana XH2000 technology infrastructure delivered by Atos (the company selected by a call for tender for the acquisition, delivery, installation and maintenance of the Bulgarian supercomputer).
"The ambition of the Bulgarian team is to create conditions for the use of Discoverer not only for scientific research, but to create a platform for its use by business as a service (HPCaS)," Statev went on to say. He noted Discoverer's just as important integration into the national scientific infrastructure system and the joint and effective use of investments in the Centers of Excellence and Centers of Competence.
Addressing the launch ceremony, European Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth 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."
European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) Executive Director Anders described Discoverer as "a very important milestone towards meeting our objective of making Europe a global leader in high performance computing." "Discoverer will significantly increase the computing power currently available in Europe. It will drive innovation, power research and support the digital sovereignty of Europe," he added.
Funded via a joint investment of about 11.5 million euro from the EuroHPC JU and Bulgaria, Discoverer will provide HPC services to a wide range of users in Bulgaria, the Balkan region and Europe, supporting the development of applications across science, the public sector and industry in health, ecology, agriculture or material design, such as discovering new drugs, better understanding molecular interactions, or facilitating climate and seismic simulation.
So far, the EuroHPC JU has inaugurated two other petascale supercomputers (in Slovenia and Luxembourg) and two other petascale supercomputers have been acquired (in Czechia and in Portugal), and three pre-exascale supercomputers are underway and will soon complement the petascale machines (in Finland, Italy and Spain). LG/VE, LG
//
LG1433NW.108
108 ECONOMY - SUPERCOMPUTER - LAUNCH amplified
Bulgarian World-Class
Supercomputer Goes into
Operation
Sofia, October 21 (BTA) - The Bulgarian supercomputer Discoverer was officially inaugurated at the Sofia Tech Park (STP) in the capital city on Thursday, STP Supervisory Board Chairman Peter Statev told a news conference.
Discoverer has achieved performance of 4.5 Petaflops (i.e. it can execute 4.5 million billion operations per second) and peak performance of 6 Petaflops. The new petascale machine is ranked 91st on the TOP500 world's most powerful supercomputer systems list. Its design is based on the BullSequana XH2000 technology infrastructure delivered by Atos (the company selected by a call for tender for the acquisition, delivery, installation and maintenance of the Bulgarian supercomputer).
"The ambition of the Bulgarian team is to create conditions for the use of Discoverer not only for scientific research, but to create a platform for its use by business as a service (HPCaS)," Statev went on to say. He noted Discoverer's just as important integration into the national scientific infrastructure system and the joint and effective use of investments in the Centers of Excellence and Centers of Competence.
Addressing the launch ceremony, European Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth 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."
European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) Executive Director Anders described Discoverer as "a very important milestone towards meeting our objective of making Europe a global leader in high performance computing." "Discoverer will significantly increase the computing power currently available in Europe. It will drive innovation, power research and support the digital sovereignty of Europe," he added.
Funded via a joint investment of about 11.5 million euro from the EuroHPC JU and Bulgaria, Discoverer will provide HPC services to a wide range of users in Bulgaria, the Balkan region and Europe, supporting the development of applications across science, the public sector and industry in health, ecology, agriculture or material design, such as discovering new drugs, better understanding molecular interactions, or facilitating climate and seismic simulation.
So far, the EuroHPC JU has inaugurated two other petascale supercomputers (in Slovenia and Luxembourg) and two other petascale supercomputers have been acquired (in Czechia and in Portugal), and three pre-exascale supercomputers are underway and will soon complement the petascale machines (in Finland, Italy and Spain). LG/VE, LG
//
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