2024-02-18 01:50:49
The Bulgarian supercomputer “Hemus” was put into operation on September 15, 2023. Until October 31, intensive tuning was carried out in order to establish and document real performance on internationally recognized standardized tests. This enabled “Hemus” to take the prestigious 360th place in the ranking of the most powerful supercomputers in the world (TOP 500) published on November 16, says correspondent member and professor Svetozar Margenov – director of the Institute of Information and Communication Technologies at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (IIKT-BAS). He is also the head of the “Center for Excellence in Informatics and Information and Communication Technologies”, BTA points out.
On October 19, 2023, the Prime Minister Academician Nikolay Denkov and the Chairman of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences Academician Julian Revalski officially opened the new Bulgarian supercomputer “Hemus”.
From the beginning of November, the actual use of the supercomputer by users began, said the director of IIKT-BAS, and explained that “applications that until now were executed on the older supercomputer “Avithol” are being migrated step by step. Priority is given to tasks for which rapid action is particularly important. Such, for example, are the molecular dynamics simulations that underlie the computer-aided development of new drugs. Another such example of great societal importance is research into the impacts of climate change. Scientists working in this field, can now take advantage of the significantly higher (petascale) performance of the Hemus supercomputer, correspondent member Margenov explained to the agency.
He said Hemus is a heterogeneous multipurpose supercomputer. This is particularly important for the range of effective applications. The opportunities for complex research and innovation in areas such as artificial intelligence, climatology, bioinformatics, drug design, simulations of high-tech materials and processes, and big data analysis are rising to a qualitatively new level. An increasingly important target group in the team’s work will be Bulgarian companies with innovative capacity that create, produce and sell finished high-tech products on the world market.
In the field of supercomputer applications and high-performance computing, Bulgarian scientists have an established authority in South-Eastern and even Central Europe, said the director of IIKT-BAS. Supercomputers are fundamental to the modern development of artificial intelligence systems, which are based on training complex models on very large data sets. For example, we are working on this type of artificial intelligence applications in areas such as language and semantic technologies, electronic health care, network resource management, human-machine interaction, bioinformatics and neurotechnologies, said correspondent member Svetozar Margenov.