The Faculty for Information Systems and Technologies (FIST) at the University of Donja Gorica (UDG) has been awarded a prestigious grant through the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking Open Call, marking a significant milestone for Montenegrin academic engagement with cutting-edge high-performance computing (HPC) resources.
As part of this grant, FIST has secured access to the Leonardo Booster partition at CINECA, one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe. This will enable FIST researchers to perform large-scale experiments that are otherwise infeasible with standard computing infrastructure.
The awarded project focuses on cross-lingual transfer learning in large language models (LLMs), aiming to systematically evaluate how model architecture and scale influence multilingual performance. By fine-tuning major LLM families (LLaMA, Mistral, DeepSeek) across model sizes from 1B to 70B parameters, the research will generate insights into optimal model selection under real-world resource constraints—critical for European institutions working with diverse languages and limited compute budgets. This is a development project with HPC resources available for 12 months.
This achievement underscores the growing capacity of UDG and FIST to contribute to frontier AI research, while reinforcing the mission of the National Competence Center in HPC (NCC Montenegro) to support HPC adoption across academia and industry in the region.
We congratulate the FIST team on this major success and look forward to sharing results from their HPC-powered investigations.