Plovdiv University “Paisij Hilendarski” (PU) is the largest higher education institution in Southern Bulgaria and the second largest in the country after Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”. PU’s main activities are training specialists with higher education in the fields of humanities, natural sciences, engineering and social sciences, and conducting research aimed at developing fundamental scientific research, modern technologies and their applications in practice.

The Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics of PU (FMI) has over 45 years of history. Today it is an established and authoritative center for scientific research and education in the fields of mathematics, informatics and information technologies. For several years, PU researchers have been active users of the high-performance infrastructure located in the Institute of Information and Communication Technologies (IICT). After preliminary discussions  between the team of the National Competence Center – Bulgaria with the host organization IICT and the colleagues from PU, topics were determined for two training seminars, which were held on June 9 at the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics of Plovdiv University:

• “Supercomputer Applications on HEMUS”, 10:00 – 12:00 h. The seminar presented the computing infrastructure of IICT-BAS, the specialized software tools installed on the HEMUS supercomputer and approaches for its optimal use. The possibilities for implementing applications from various scientific fields and interesting open questions in the field of high-performance computing were discussed.
• “HPC Simulators for Quantum Computing”, 14:00-16:00. Quantum simulators are specialized devices or algorithms that use the quantum principles of mechanics to model complex quantum systems that cannot be effectively simulated by classical computers. They are based on the use of quantum bits (qubits), which can exist in multiple states simultaneously thanks to phenomena such as superposition and entanglement. The possibilities of using HEMUS for simulation of quantum computing were presented and tasks that can be solved on currently available quantum devices and some of their aspects can be tested on simulators were discussed.

The seminars were organized by the National Competence Center – Bulgaria within the framework of the EuroCC2 project. The lecturer at both seminars was Prof. Emanuil Atanassov. 20 researchers and two representatives of SMEs in Plovdiv participated in these seminars.