Agreement of Fundamental Research with the New Supercomputer of Bulgaria

Friday, 28 January 2022 20:05

The UNWE and Consortium Petascale Supercomputer - Bulgaria concluded an Agreement of Fundamental Research. At the official ceremony in Sofia Tech Park the Rector Prof. Dr. Dimitar Dimitrov and the representative of the Consortium Petar Statev signed the document.

The cooperation will contribute to the synergy between the competence centers and excellence centers.

The UNWE participates as a leading partner in the National Center for Competence developing a national scientific infrastructure for Digitalization of the Economy in the Big Data Environment /DIGD/ under the European framework NERD and as a party to the National Center for Competence under the European High Performance Computing Framework EuroCC.

A special guest at the event was the Minister of Education and Science Acad. Nikolay Denkov.

Prof. Dr. Dimitar Dimitrov, Minister Nikolay Denkov and Petar Statev /from the right to the left/

Minister Denkov defined the UNWE and the Rector Prof. Dimitrov as very active in searching for new opportunities as well as the Consortium Supercomputer Petascale - Bulgaria so the signing of the Agreement is the proof for that.

"We continue developing our good cooperation, we have signed a Memorandum with Sofia Tech Park and when the two projects were developing – the one on Digitalization of the Economy in a Big Data Environment, the other on High Speed Computing involving also Sofia University and BAS, it was born the idea to connect them to the Supercomputer, and when there is good interaction, things just happen", outlined the Rector Prof. Dimitrov.

"With the kind assistance of UNWE the Petascale Supercomputer Consortium - Bulgaria is expanding its area of activity doing something very important - we create synchronization between the competence centers and the excellence centers we have. UNWE is a leader in their creation and development and the meaning of our infrastructure is just that - to work together and be useful to the society, to the economy and the scientific community", said Peter Statev.

The Agreement provisions joint creation of fundamental and applied research to integrate the Big Data System with Business Analysis and Artificial Intelligence - Hadoop (HPDA), built at UNWE, with the Supercomputer Discoverer.

Implementation of non-economic activities using the research infrastructure created under the project Digitalization of the Economy in a Big Data Environment is also part of the cooperation.

On behalf of UNWE the signing of the Agreement was attended by Prof. D.Sc. Valentin Kisimov, Chief Coordinator of the Competence Center DIGD and Prof. Dr. Kamelia Stefanova, Head of the Information Technologies and Communications Department.

Prof. D.Sc. Valentin Kisimov, Chief Coordinator of the Competence Center DIGD at UNWE, Kiril Kirilov, Chief Operating Head of the Supercomputer Consortium, Prof. Dr. Kamelia Stefanova, Head of the Information Technologies and Communications Department of UNWE, Petar Statev, Chairman of the Management Board of the Supercomputer Consortium and the Tech Park, Minister Nikolay Denkov, Prof. Dr. Dimitar Dimitrov, Rector of UNWE, Prof. Simeon Stoyanov - Business Development Director of the Supercomputer Consortium /from the left to the right/

About the Petascale Supercomputer Consortium - Bulgaria

Petascale Supercomputer - Bulgaria is a Consortium that combines the knowledge of member organizations and over 15 years of experience in applied sciences. Its founders are Sofia Tech Park, the National Center for Supercomputer Applications and the Strategic Center for Artificial Intelligence.

Its experience includes activities related to the building up of 2 supercomputers - IBM Blue Gene/P and HP HPC cluster. The Consortium has also participated in 6 programmes of the Partnership for Advanced Electronic Data Processing in Europe /PRACE/ through over 13 projects in collaboration with the partners of the initiative.

Discoverer Petascale Supercomputer has a computing power of over 4.4 petaflops Rmax and over 6 petaflops Rpeak.

The Discoverer system will have at disposal 2 petabytes of memory.

The major objective of the Consortium is to promote the scientific activity with application in the industry and to create favorable conditions for the development of an even better European economy.


About the project Digitalization of the Economy in a Big Data Environment /DIGD/ No. BG05М2ОР001-1.002-0002

The project is funded under the procedure BG05M2OP001-1.002 "Building up and Development of Competence Centers" - Operational Programme Science and Education for Smart Growth 2014 - 2020. The project implementation period is 30.03.2018 - 30.11.2023.

The leading organization and coordinator of the project is the University of National and World Economy /UNWE/ and partners are the Technical University - Gabrovo, the Economic University - Varna, "Angel Kanchev" University of Ruse, "Paisii Hilendarski" University of Plovdiv and the Institute of Information and Communication Technologies - BAS.

Associated project partners are Vaptech Ltd. and the Universidade Nova de Lisboa / Faculdade de Ciencieas e Tecnologia.

The project objective is to establish a Research Center for Competence in Digitalization of the Economy in a Big Data Environment. The Competence Center will have a technical infrastructure located on the territory of the project partners. The main computing resources will be located on the territory of UNWE and by the allocated computing resources a unified Cloud Infrastructure with additional hosting functions will be built. All resources in the Cloud Infrastructure will be available from all over the country as well as from abroad in order to conduct research.


About the project National Competence Center for the European High Performance Computing Framework EuroCC

The Project partners are the UNWE, "St. Cl. Ohridski” University of Sofia and the Institute of Information and Communication Technologies of BAS.

Within the frameworks of the EuroCC project the participating countries will establish a network of European National Competence Centers /NCCs/ in the field of High Performance Computing /HPC/, High Performance Data Analysis /HPDA/ and Artificial Intelligence /AI/ which will coordinate activities in the relevant areas at national level and will serve as a contact point for customers from the industry, science and the general public. The EuroCC project is 50 percent funded by the EU Science and Innovation Programme Horizon 2020 (through the European High Performance Computing Enterprise - EuroHPC) and 50 percent by national funding programmes of the partner countries.


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