On February 5, 2026, a Doctoral Information Meeting was held in Room 228, Block 2 of the Institute of Information and Communication Technologies at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (IICT–BAS).

The event was organized to support early-career researchers by presenting contemporary research infrastructures, best practices, and opportunities for professional development within the modern scientific ecosystem.

The forum featured thematic presentations focused on research ethics, high-performance computing, open science, and scientific publishing, providing practical guidance for enhancing research efficiency and increasing the international visibility of doctoral students.

During the event, Prof. Emanouil Atanassov delivered a presentation dedicated to the computational infrastructure at IICT–BAS. This infrastructure provides a modern technological environment and significant opportunities for young scientists and doctoral candidates to conduct high-quality research at the institute.

Special attention was given to the petascale supercomputer HEMUS, which integrates CPU and GPU subsystems with a total peak performance exceeding 3 petaflops, interconnected via a high-speed InfiniBand network. A data storage and processing system with a capacity of 6.72 PB was also presented, comprising five doubly redundant servers for managing a Lustre-based file system.

This infrastructure enables research teams at IICT–BAS, involved in the Bulgarian National Competence Centre (NCC) in HPC/HPDA/AI, to develop a portfolio of services and training courses to be shared within the network of European NCCs established under the EUROCC1/2 project. The use of the HPC infrastructure at IICT–BAS provides doctoral students with opportunities to accelerate their research, improve the quality of data processing and analysis, and enhance the competitiveness and international impact of their scientific publications and research outcomes.