The activities connected with scientific infrastructure are of a national significance and refer to research and supporting of important national infrastructure with key meaning for scientific and educations institutes in the country:

• Development and maintenance of Bulgarian Research and Education Network (BREN), which provides the academicals and educational institutes with:
  • high speed network connections;
  • possibility for the use of recourses of the main network node, located at the IICT, to provide network services, using of virtual Web servers and using trusted and high performance memory environment;
  • use of Grid infrastructure of IICT by Bulgarian and foreign specialists;
  • use of the super computer center, located at the State Agency for Information Technology and Communications.
• Development and maintenance of Grid clusters, which are the greatest part of National Grid infrastructure of the country .
• Development of managing systems for BREN and GRID security.
• Support of activating process of the products from MS, acquired by the Ministry of Education and Science which work at the academic network.

The main node of the Bulgarian Research and Educational Network is located in the IICT. This node is managing and maintaining by the specialists from the Institute. In 2008 within the framework of GÉANT2 project executed by BREN, a main node (Point of Presence – PoP) of European main node of academic networks GÉANT was built in the institute. In the begging in 2009 this node was connected with Athens, Bucharest and Budapest, the speed via communication lines is 10 Gb/s, with Istanbul the speed via communication line is 2,5 Gb/s. The speed of the line, connecting the BREN network with man node of GÉANT, is 1 Gb/s. At that moment Bulgarian research and education network provides high-speed Internet access to huge information resources from all over the world, to scientist researchers, lecturers and students,. This allows them to participate directly in a range of international projects, to increase qualifications and to use the resources of the electronic education.

The largest Bulgarian GRID cluster is situated in the Institute of Information and Communication Technologies at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (IICT-BAS) and is maintaining by the specialists from the Institute. It is launched as part of the pan European GRID infrastructure. Two of them are managing and developing of specialists from the Computer Networks and Architectures Department. These clusters dispose 280 core processors commonly and 28 TBytes disc memory, which are organized in autonomous mass memory network (Storage Area Network) with Fibre Channel interface. One of the clusters disposes of 80 processors, which used Myrinet communicational environment for massive-parallel tasks, requiring low delay. The Bulgarian GRID clusters are built and hosted whit technical and technological support of one of the most significant infrastructural projects to EC - EGEE2 and SEE-GRID2. The clusters work in permanent control and they are free access for using of Bulgarian scientific society for applications, which require huge computational recourses. IICT provides a methodic help and training on their usage, as for the purpose a small educational GRID cluster with 8 core processors is particularly created for that purpose.

Analysis of the architecture and research methods for investigation of high speed communication networks and programme facilities for network exchange of multimedia information. Investigation of the methods for computer network protection and security.

Development of methods for investigation LAN troughput, verification of network protocols, system security, system network administration and monitoring.

Within the projects GÉANT, executed by “Bulgarian Research and Education Network” (BREN) association, an estimation of the resources for supervision and control of the computer networks for the aims of the information security is performed. Systems for monitoring the state of the services from the network infrastructure perfSONAR Multi-Domain Monitoring (MDM) are developed and supported. Systems for the visualization status of the infrastructure for remote control of the monitoring systems are devised.

This is a new direction in the activities of the department, associated with the foundations, software infrastructures and applications of large scale distributed systems, based on GRID technologies. The research activities are structured around several complementary research areas, namely Information and knowledge management, Programming models, System architecture, Grid infrastructure monitoring services, Resource management and scheduling.

Research is carried out in the area of Quantum computing and also in methods for parallel execution of certain tasks on the global network.