Atos has delivered and assembled a new supercomputer at the Sofia Tech Park in Bulgaria, named Discoverer.

The 4.4 petaflops BullSequana XH2000 system is part of the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking, an effort to build a number of powerful supercomputers across the European Union.

Once fully connected to the EuroHPC network, it is expected to reach a peak performance of six petaflops.

Run by the Petascale Supercomputer Bulgaria (PetaSC-Bulgaria) consortium, Discoverer is the most powerful supercomputer in Eastern Europe.

Built for €11.5 million ($14m), the supercomputer has 144,384 cores, uses AMD Epyc processors, features 300TB of RAM, and 2PB of storage.

The system, which has 12 computing racks and 2 racks with auxiliary infrastructure, is cooled with hot water.

"The big challenge for the Consortium team is building and making a valuable connection between the academy, the industry, the Sofia Tech Park, and the petascale computer," said Peter Statev, the chairman of the supervisory board at Sofia Tech Park.

"We already have the first requests for solving pragmatic tasks in chemistry, medicine, and biology. Of course, we are also looking forward to the future – we are talking with Atos to add their platform and experience in quantum computers."

PetaSC-Bulgaria signed a memorandum of cooperation with quantum analog computing company InfinityQ to build and test quantum technologies.

The Canadian startup will install a quantum computing module at the Sofia Tech Park.

Outside the park, four more petascale systems are planned under EuroHPC - in Luxembourg, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, and Portugal.

Three, significantly more powerful, pre-exascale supercomputers are set for Finland, Italy, and Spain.