The Slovak Academy of Sciences (SAS) has officially launched a new national supercomputer, Perun, at its campus in Bratislava on Monday. Together with an existing facility in Košice, which went online last November, it now forms a single integrated high-performance computing network, sharing data and user management.
According to Lucia Demovičová from the SAS Computing Centre, the system may resemble a conventional computer, but its components are specifically designed for high-performance computing — far more powerful, more numerous, and linked by a dedicated high-speed network for rapid communication.
Perun, now the most powerful computing system in Slovakia, serves as the main hub of the country’s high-performance infrastructure. It can handle billions of operations per second and speeds up calculations by splitting complex tasks into smaller parts and processing them simultaneously.
SAS President Martin Venhart says the supercomputer should advance scientific research in Slovakia and support cooperation with industry and government — for example by simulating the impact of key state processes in a virtual environment.
Perun ranks 125th on the global TOP500 list of supercomputers and, with a performance of up to 14.5 petaflops, is among the most powerful systems in the region. It will serve a wide range of fields, from materials science and drug development to climate research, chemical simulations and AI model training.
The project is part of Slovakia’s broader digital modernisation effort, funded through the Recovery and Resilience Plan, with €36.3 million allocated to SAS and €20.9 million to the Technical University of Košice.
Source: STVR, TASR
