In our recent conversation with Professor Miloš Cvetanović from the School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Belgrade discusses how high-performance computing (HPC) technologies are being adopted in Southeast Europe and why regional cooperation is essential for their further development.
According to him, countries in the region are at a similar stage in adopting this technology. The uptake of new technologies typically follows several stages. The first stage consists of innovators, researchers and institutions that are the first to start using new tools. In the case of HPC, these include research organizations such as the Institute of Physics Belgrade, the School of Electrical Engineering, and other scientific institutions.
The next stage is that of the so-called early adopters. Professor Cvetanović estimates that most of the region is currently in this phase. At present, around 10 to 13 percent of the research community is already using or is willing to adopt HPC technologies.
The goal of the European project EuroCC is to further strengthen the network of institutions working with HPC and to demonstrate to other researchers and organizations how they can adopt this technology in their work. This would help move the community into the next stage—the early majority, when a technology begins to see much wider use. Such progress would also enable existing computing resources to be used more efficiently.
After that come two additional phases: the late majority and the slowest group of adopters, representing the next fifty percent of potential users of HPC technologies. Since the level of adoption is similar across much of the region, Professor Cvetanović emphasizes that regional and European cooperation is crucial for the further development of this field. He stresses the importance of continuing collaboration and knowledge exchange through activities such as workshops and face-to-face meetings between researchers and experts. Such communication, he notes, is key to expanding and successfully implementing HPC technologies in both science and industry.
