The Bulgarian unit of France’s IT giant Atos said on May 11 it has fully delivered and assembled the EuroHPC supercomputer at Sofia Tech Park, which it claims will be the most powerful supercomputer in Eastern Europe and will help to leverage Bulgaria’s high-tech ambitions.

Atos was selected to build the petascale supercomputer, based on Atos’ powerful BullSequana XH2000 architecture, by the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU), the hosting entity, and the Petascale Supercomputer Bulgaria consortium whose leading partner is Sofia Tech Park.

The supercomputer was jointly financed by Bulgaria and EuroHPC JU with the investment totalling €11.5mn.

“This will be the most powerful supercomputer in Eastern Europe and will help to leverage Bulgaria’s high-tech ambitions. Atos’ Czech Republic project teams have already started the configuration tests and the supercomputer is expected to start working operationally in July 2021,” the company said in a press release.

The supercomputer will serve the development of scientific, public and industrial applications in many fields, including bioinformatics, pharmacy, molecular dynamics and mechanics, quantum chemistry and biochemistry, artificial intelligence, personalised medicine, bioengineering, meteorology and the fight against climate change.

"As Europe’s leading supercomputing manufacturer, we are proud to be supporting researchers in industry and universities across Europe accelerate scientific discovery and to develop solutions for current challenges such as those in health, energy and agriculture,” Agnès Boudot, senior vice president, head of HPC & quantum at Atos, said in the press release.