ASSOCIATION "NATIONAL CENTRE FOR SUPERCOMPUTING APPLICATIONS"

Their core work

NCSA Bulgaria is the national supercomputing centre providing high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure, training, and application support to the research community. They contribute to the pan-European PRACE supercomputing ecosystem by operating computing resources and enabling researchers to run large-scale simulations. Their work spans HPC services, application enabling (helping scientists optimize code for supercomputers), and increasingly combustion and energy-related simulations at exascale. Based in Sofia, they serve as Bulgaria's gateway to European supercomputing infrastructure.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

NCSA's early H2020 work (2015-2017) focused purely on operating and maintaining HPC infrastructure through the PRACE programme — essential but general-purpose computing support. From 2017 onward, they shifted toward more specialized and ambitious work: co-designing extreme-scale computing architectures (DEEP-EST) and applying HPC to domain-specific challenges like combustion simulation and decarbonisation (CoEC). Their trajectory shows a clear move from infrastructure operator to domain-specific HPC application partner.

NCSA is evolving from a general-purpose HPC provider toward applied exascale computing for energy and climate problems, making them increasingly relevant for simulation-heavy research in decarbonisation.

How they like to work

NCSA operates exclusively as a participant — they have never coordinated an H2020 project, which is typical for national HPC centres that contribute infrastructure and expertise rather than driving research agendas. They work in large consortia (80 unique partners across 5 projects), which reflects the nature of PRACE and Centre of Excellence projects that aggregate many national computing centres. This means they are experienced in large multinational collaborations and bring reliable, well-defined contributions rather than project leadership.

With 80 unique consortium partners across 26 countries, NCSA has one of the broadest collaborative networks possible for a 5-project portfolio — a direct result of participating in pan-European PRACE infrastructure projects that include nearly every EU member state's computing centre. Their network is essentially the European HPC community itself.

What sets them apart

NCSA is Bulgaria's primary node in the European supercomputing network, giving them direct connections to virtually every national HPC centre on the continent. For consortium builders, they offer a reliable entry point to Bulgarian computing resources and expertise while bringing experience from the largest HPC collaborations in Europe. Their recent pivot into combustion and energy simulations means they can now offer both the computing power and the domain knowledge to run complex energy-related models.

Highlights from their portfolio

• CoEC
  Their largest grant (EUR 325,000) and a strategic shift — applying HPC to combustion, alternative fuels, and decarbonisation rather than general infrastructure.
• DEEP-EST
  Focused on co-designing next-generation extreme-scale computing architectures, pushing NCSA beyond operating existing systems into shaping future ones.
• PRACE-6IP
  The most recent PRACE phase, with explicit focus on training and application enabling — showing NCSA's role in making HPC accessible to researchers.