The general objective of BIS-21++ is to further strengthen the human potential and to reinforce the excellence in education, science, and technology of the currently most established Bulgarian IST Centre. BIS-21++ is proposed by the Institute for Paralle l Processing at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (IPP-BAS). The proposal integrates interconnected activities for: (i) improving the research training of young specialists who are involved in valuable and prestigious RTD initiatives, (ii) improving the image of "doing research in Bulgaria" by implementing qualified scientific tasks in several key IST areas, where the young specialists are involved, (iii) active networking between the BIS-21++ team and leading partners from practically all over Europe, (iv) increasing links to the economical environment by cooperation with well-established Bulgarian SMEs, (v) broad dissemination of the existing and acquired excellence for national users (by eLearning facilities) and internationally (by 9 high-level con ferences and workshops), and (vi) improved participation of the institute in FP6 and next FP7. BIS-21++ explicitly targets a list of measurable outcomes which support training and improving the human potential. All results will be assessed in due time. BIS-21++ is based on the experience of IPP-BAS in training and RTD cooperation. After 2000, the institute has been involved in 27 international and 17 national projects which enabled its present top results. BIS-21++ adds quite new value to BIS-21, Centr e of Excellence ICA1-2000-70016, supported by the EC in 2001-2004. BIS-21++ topics include several IST priority areas and keywords as well as fields like computer architectures (distributed and parallel computing), environmental mathematics, large-scale computations, research networking, human language technologies, text compression technologies and fast search.