Blog

By Dr. Žiga Zebec (IZUM – Institute of Information Science)

 

On May 29, 2025, we welcomed Slovenian researchers to a dynamic virtual gathering, “EPICURE meets Slovenia”.

 

The goal?

 

To connect our national research community with the powerful opportunities offered by the EPICURE project and Europe’s leading high-performance computing (HPC) systems, like HPC Vega, Slovenia’s flagship supercomputer.

 

The webinar was designed to be more than a presentation, but a conversation with our current and future users. We introduced the concept of Level 2 and Level 3 support, where experts from Application Support Teams (ASTs) assist users optimize their code, improve scalability, and exploit HPC resources. Participants were invited to share details of their ongoing or planned projects, the challenges they face, and how EPICURE’s AST experts can help them unlock greater performance, scalability, and efficiency; ultimately resulting in better research results.

 

We started with an overview of HPC Vega, its architecture, capabilities, and the resources available to both national and European users. HPC Vega offers 6.9 PFLOPS of total computing power and a high-speed optical cable (InfiniBand) network to the users. Additionally, we presented the funding structure, pre-installed codes, and use cases in research. To benefit from EPICURE support, researchers must apply for EuroHPC JU computing resources. We demonstrated how to navigate the portal and showed our own application for EuroHPC JU resources. The session also covered the different access modes, including Development, Regular, Extreme Scale, and AI Factory calls.

 

The highlight of the webinar was the interactive session, where our team briefly discussed participants’ projects based on the information shared in advance. The presented projects ranged from quantum simulations and clinical text classification to tissue mechanics and AI-driven physics models. The diversity of projects was stunning, clearly demonstrating that Slovenian science is ready to scale.

 

We concluded with a showcase of best practices from ongoing EPICURE projects, including lessons from optimizing AI assistants, GPU-based financial models, and large-scale physics simulations. These real-world examples illustrated how strategic support can improve performance and accelerate discovery.

 

Throughout the session, the chat buzzed with questions and ideas. The exchange continued seamlessly during the event; and did not stop there. We encouraged all participants interested in HPC computing to reach out after the event. Several researchers expressed their intention to apply for computing resources offered by EuroHPC JU on HPC Vega and take advantage of EPICURE support.

 

We would like to thank everyone who joined, shared, and engaged. Let’s keep pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.

 

Whether you’re just starting or already deep into HPC computing, EPICURE is here to help.

 

EPICURE is not just about computing: it’s about empowering people to compute.