The National Center for Supercomputing Applications ( bg, Национален център за суперкомпютърни приложения) is a research institution located in

Sofia Sofia ( ; bg, София, Sofiya, ) is the capital and largest city of Bulgaria. It is situated in the Sofia Valley at the foot of the Vitosha mountain in the western parts of the country. The city is built west of the Iskar river, and ha ...

Bulgaria Bulgaria (; bg, България, Bǎlgariya), officially the Republic of Bulgaria,, ) is a country in Southeast Europe. It is situated on the eastern flank of the Balkans, and is bordered by Romania to the north, Serbia and North Macedon ...

. It was established in 2008 with the aim of promoting and regulating high-performance processing operations of scientific information. The NCSA works in affiliation with scientists and researchers from the

Sofia University Sofia University, "St. Kliment Ohridski" at the University of Sofia, ( bg, Софийски университет „Св. Климент Охридски“, ''Sofijski universitet „Sv. Kliment Ohridski“'') is the oldest higher education i ...

, the

Bulgarian Academy of Sciences The Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (abbreviated BAS; bg, Българска академия на науките, ''Balgarska akademiya na naukite'', abbreviated ''БАН'') is the National Academy of Bulgaria, established in 1869. The Academy ...

, the

Technical Technical may refer to: * Technical (vehicle), an improvised fighting vehicle * Technical analysis, a discipline for forecasting the future direction of prices through the study of past market data * Technical drawing, showing how something is co ...

and

Medical Medicine is the science and practice of caring for a patient, managing the diagnosis, prognosis, prevention, treatment, palliation of their injury or disease, and promoting their health. Medicine encompasses a variety of health care practic ...

universities in Sofia, as well as other organizations. The center is under the jurisdiction of the State Agency for Information Technology and Communications (SAITC). When established, the center operated the only

supercomputer A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second ( FLOPS) instead of million instructions ...

in the Balkan region, an

IBM Blue Gene Blue Gene is an IBM project aimed at designing supercomputers that can reach operating speeds in the petaFLOPS (PFLOPS) range, with low power consumption. The project created three generations of supercomputers, Blue Gene/L, Blue Gene/P, ...

/P, which was among the most powerful supercomputers in the world according to

TOP500 The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computing, distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these ...

until November 2009. It has two racks with 2,048 850 MHz processors with 8,192 cores. The system is to be upgraded with additional I/O nodes and disk space in the near future. The supercomputer was switched off in 2015.

References

Institutes of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences Information technology in Bulgaria Supercomputer sites Sofia University {{Bulgaria-stub