On April 11, 2024, in building 25A, room 218, at the IICT-BAS premises, the annual open workshop organized by the NCC-Bulgaria took place. Its main goal was to review the achieved results of the EUROCC2 project and discuss new tasks for the next period. All team members, as well as experts and potential users from academia, industry, and public administration, were invited to participate.
The event’s program included an overview of achievements, work analysis, presentation and discussion of the Competence Centre’s Roadmap for 2024, as well as many discussions. The workshop was opened by corresponding member Margenov – Director of IICT-BAS and chairman of the Competence Centre’s Advisory Committee, who expressed his satisfaction with the team’s work. The head of the Competence Centre – Professor Aneta Karaivanova, presented an overview of the work that had been carried out, along with an analysis of the achieved results.
The Bulgarian National Competence Centre is a focal point for current and potential users of high-performance technologies from SMEs, academia, and public administration. A portfolio of services has been created to streamline access to scientific/technical expertise and consultations and to facilitate access to modern equipment, competencies, software codes, and tools developed and maintained by the team. Thanks to the active online presence and numerous events organized by the project, raising awareness and dissemination of the benefits of HPC/HPDA/AI and the available services of the National Competence Centre among potential user communities, including SMEs, has been significantly enhanced. A solid foundation for national training has been established, highly qualified expert teams have been built, community requirements have been identified, and numerous initiatives for developing user skills have been organized.
The program continued with two panels: “Interaction with Industry” (moderator: Prof. V. Kisimov) and “Training and Collaboration within the Project” (moderator: Prof. A. Proykova), where new project tasks were presented and discussed. Before the final discussion, Prof. T. Gurov outlined some ideas for future work in 2024 in the field of communication and dissemination of project information.
The workshop concluded with a discussion on new trends in high-performance technologies, cooperation with other national competence centres, Bulgaria’s place on the European competence map, lessons learned, and the approach to new tasks.
