History of the Nestum Cluster
The cluster was designed, built and configured by the Monte Carlo group at Faculty of Physics, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”.
The Monte Carlo group has previous experience operating the Physon HPC cluster, which is the main computational machine of the University of Sofia campus. Specializations of team members in EPCC (Edinburgh, UK ), CINECA (Bologna, Italy), BSC (Barcelona, Spain), HLRS (Stuttgart, Germany), RWTH (Aachen, Germany) are highly acknowledged.
Mission of the HPC laboratory
The mission of the HPC laboratory as a part of the Sofia Tech Park laboratory complex is to deliver reliable, sustainable computing resources and services to facilitate the use of high-performance computing and to meet the small scale and midrange computational demands of the scientific research community in the academic institutions and high-tech SMEs located all over the country and the region.
Computing is a tool as important as experimentation and theory in solving various scientific problems of the twenty-first century. The mission of the laboratory is to support computational science, in which interdisciplinary teams of scientists consider fundamental problems in science and engineering that require computation and have broad scientific and economic impacts.
The European Commission recognised the need for an EU-level policy in HPC to optimise national and European investments, addressing the entire HPC ecosystem and adopted its HPC Strategy on 15 February 2012.
The HPC team takes forward the policy developed in the Communication of the European Commission on Big Data and supports the European Open Science policy agenda which aims to increase the quality and impact of science, building on the achievements of Open Access.
HPC laboratory is associated partner of the UNITe Project.
The HPCL members participate in the projects EuroCC (Grant agreement ID: 951732) and EuroCC2 (Grant agreement ID: 101101903) with the mission to continue the establishment of a network of National Centres of Competence (NCC) in the field of high-performance computing (HPC), High Performance Data Analytics (HPDA), Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the most efficient way, while continuing to address the differences in the maturity of HPC deployment in Europe, for which improvement has already been noted. EuroCC 2 promotes innovation, collaboration, and the use of supercomputing capabilities for the benefit of European science, industry and society as a whole: https://www.eurocc-access.eu/about-us/the-projects/ .
More about the EuroCC-NCC-Bulgaria can be found here: (НОВИТЕ ТЕХНОЛОГИИ – ПРЕДИЗВИКАТЕЛСТВО И ЗА ВИСОКОТЕХНОЛОГИЧНИ ОБЩЕСТВА Проф. д.фз.н. Ана Пройкова , НАУКА – кн. 3/2021, том XXXI, pp.16-19, Издание на Съюза на учените в България)