The Chief Executive Director at Sofia Tech Park, Todor Mladenov, took part in the first meeting of the Digital Board of Sofia – an innitiative of Sofia Municipality.
The Digital Board of Sofia is made up of leaders from tech companies and business associations alongside academics. The chairman of the board is the Deputy Mayor of Sofia for Digitalisation, innovation and economic development. The purpose of the Board is to advise the Deputy Mayor on implementing new digital technologies aimed at the highest level of performance across Sofia’s public services, utilities and infrastructure. Board members share expertise and guidance on best practices and give advice on specific decisions to be made by Sofia Municipality. The Board gives advice to the Deputy Mayor on smart city programs, the selection, evaluation, prioritisation and funding of technology solutions and smart city projects to be implemented.
Sofia Tech Park and Sofia Municipality are members and founders of the Digital Innovation Hub, InnovationAmp.
The Bulgarian EuroHPC supercomputer Discoverer is ranked 91st on the TOP 500 world’s most powerful supercomputer systems list. The performance of the machine, located on the territory of Sofia Tech Park, was evaluated through special tests carried out according to the standards and requirements of the independent non-governmental organisation that compiles the list.
Discoverer’s test results exceeded the planned computing power of 4,44 petaflops as it reached 4,518.9 petaflops. It also reached a peak performance of 5,942.0 petaflops computing power.
The achieved results place Discoverer on 66th place in the additional ranking list of TOP 500 – HPCG that ranks the HPC and AI workload convergence based on machine learning and deep learning through solving a system of linear equations using new algorithms with mixed precision.
Sofia Tech Park and Petascale Supercomputer – Bulgaria Consortium are founders and members of the digital innovation hub, InnovationAmp.
The supercomputer Discoverer is produced and delivered by the worldwide leader in digital transformation Atos. The number of supercomputers ranked on the TOP 500 list, produced by Atos is 36 with total computing power of 206 petaflops. Atos’ BullSequana infrastructure is also used in four additional EuroHPC supercomputing centres in Italy, Slovenia, Luxembourg, and Portugal.
The inclusion of Discoverer among the top 500 high-performance machines worldwide positions Bulgaria on the world map of high-tech countries and will turn it into a digital hub in Southeast Europe.
“Discoverer’s excellent placement on the TOP500 supercomputers ranking confirms that the EuroHPC JU is working at full throttle. As the 27th most powerful supercomputer in the European Union, Discoverer is leading the way in European HPC technology.”commented Anders Dam Jensen, the Executive Director of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking. “When all seven EuroHPC JU supercomputers are online, we can expect 670 petaflops of computing power to be available to European research and innovation. They will support the development of leading scientific research, support public sector, SMEs, and industrial applications in many domains and help further the EU’s knowledge base in science, technology, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and high-performance data analytics.”
“Atos is very proud to have designed, delivered and implemented a completely new supercomputer in Sofia Tech Park. This system named Discoverer is ranked as the 91st most powerful computer in the world and taking into account HPCG metrics, is now ranked # 66 in the world today. This machine is the most powerful machine in SEE region (South Eastern Europe) ever. If we take into account only Europe, Discoverer is in the top 30 most powerful supercomputers. It will bring new opportunity to scientific community in Bulgaria and with joint effort with commercial partners it shall allow faster growth of digital economy in this region.“ said Tomas Hlavsa, Head of the Atos Big data and Security division in Czech Republic and Slovakia
The project for creation of supercomputer, part of the EuroHPC JU network in Bulgaria is implemented by the Petascale-Bulgaria Supercomputer Consortium with Sofia Tech Park as a leading partner. The Consortium combines the knowledge of the member organizations with over 15 years of experience in applied sciences. The project is funded by the budgets of the Bulgarian state and EuroHPC JU.
The Bulgarian supercomputer’s objective is to support research and innovation activities, to stimulate the industry based on the use of technology for simulation, molding and optimization. The processing power of the machine can be used in many applied fields for the needs of wide range of public and private consumers, including small and medium enterprises at Bulgarian, regional and European level. The system will be optimized to work in different science fields, including bioinformatics, pharmacy, molecular dynamics and mechanics, quantum chemistry and biochemistry, artificial intelligence, personalized medicine, bio-engineering, weather forecasting, fight against climate change, etc.
The computing power of the Bulgarian computing system will be complemented by four additional EuroHPC petascale supercomputers, located in Luxembourg, Slovenia, the Czech Republic and Portugal, as well as by three EuroHPC pre-exascale supercomputers located in Finland, Italy and Spain. The main goal of the European supercomputer network is to stimulate the research activities with an implementation in the industry and to create favorable conditions for developing even better European economy, as well as to upgrade the computing power of the European Union
The European Digital Innovation Hub for Data Science, High Performance Computing and Artificial Intelligence, InnovationAmp, was established with the goal of facilitating the process of digital transformation of the industry and the society and of introducing the low-carbon circular economy in manufacturing and public companies, public administration and the society. Members of the Hub are Sofia Tech Park, Research & Development & Innovation Consortium, Sofia Municipality, Technical University – Sofia, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Foundation “Cluster Information and Communication Technologies” (ICT Cluster), NEVEQ Capital Management, Strategic Center for Artificial Intelligence (SCAI) and other organizations.
The goal of the digital innovation hub is to unite organizations’ and institutions’ activities in support of the digital transformation process of the industry and the society by using infrastructure, know-how, technologies and expertise in the fields of big data, high performance computing and artificial intelligence. The DIH will partner and exchange experience with European Digital Innovation Centers and will carry out projects related with the implementation of digital technologies in small and medium enterprises.
InnovationAmp will provide personalized services that will allow companies in the manufacturing and public sector, as well as local institutions, to improve their services, products and business models by taking advantage of the infinite possibilities of the artificial intelligence, big data and high performance computing.
