Bulgaria’s National Centre for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA), located in the country’s capital and which houses the first supercomputer in South Eastern Europe, was officially unveiled on September 9 2008.

The opening ceremony was led by Bulgarian Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev.

The Bulgarian supercomputer, an IBM Blue Gene/P, will be operated by a consortium that comprises the State Agency for Information Technology and Communication (SAITC), Sofia University St Kliment Ohridski, Sofia’s Technical University, the Medical University and the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, together with IBM.

The supercomputer would mostly be used by the consortium for research in medicine, including DNA-based diagnostics and the development of drugs through modelling, financial modelling and to help students in their study.

In his opening speech, Stanishev pointed out the opportunities the new centre would offer for training young researchers and in the design of new products and technologies. The centre would also allow Bulgarian businesses and research institutes to join European partners in research and other projects, Bulgarian news agency BTA quoted Stanishev as saying.

Bulgaria had the green light from the European Commission to become a regional supercomputing centre for South Eastern Europe, Stanishev said, as quoted by BTA.

Stanishev said that the new centre would provide access to additional resources through European Union financial instruments.

With its two modules, containing a total of 8192 processors, Bulgaria’s Blue Gene/P is capable of running 23.42 trillion operations a second (TFLOPS), making it one of the 100-fastest computers in the world, SAITC said.

While each of its two modules is about the size of a household refrigerator, the Blue Gene/P is more energy efficient than other similar systems, SAITC said in a media statement.

The modular design of the system would allow the computer to be scaled up to meet increasing demand, SAITC said.