HPE has introduced that it has been awarded a $160m contract to construct one of many world’s quickest supercomputers in Finland.
The new supercomputer, named LUMI, can be funded by the European Excessive Efficiency Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) and can be used to assist European researchers in addition to non-public and public organizations to advance R&D and drive innovation in a number of areas together with healthcare, climate forecasting and AI.
LUMI will also be a “pre-exascale” system with a theoretical peak efficiency of over 550 petaflops which HPE factors out is equivalent to the performance of 1.5m laptops combined.
SVP and basic manager of HPC and Mission Critical Solutions at HPE Peter Ungaro provided further particulars in a press release on how the company will work with EuroHPC JU and its partners to build LUMI, saying:
“We’re honored to be selected for LUMI and leverage our exascale era technologies to build one of many quickest supercomputers on the planet. We’re committed to supporting the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) to grab alternatives in next-generation supercomputing to bolster analysis in science, advance innovation and unlock economic growth. We are excited to collaborate with the EuroHPC JU, and thru our partnership with AMD, leverage our unique capabilities in compute, excessive-efficiency networking, storage and software to help enhance the way people live and work.”
LUMI supercomputer
LUMI will be powered by HPE Cray EX supercomputers that feature next-generation AMD EPYC CPUs and AMD Intuition GPUs to ship unprecedented performance and targeted deep learning capabilities.
The supercomputer can be hosted in the CSC – IT Center for Science situated in Kajaani, Finland and it is going to be shared by ten European countries including Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Poland, Sweden, and Switzerland as part of the newly formed LUMI consortium.
On the same time through its collaboration with EuroHPC JU, HPE will expand supercomputing resources in an effort to speed up the European roadmap to attain exascale computing which will be the next big leap that will deliver five to ten times faster performance than today’s systems.
Executive director of EuroHPC JU Anders Dam Jensen defined that LUMI can be available in mid-2021, saying:
“As soon as operational in mid-2021, the LUMI supercomputer can be one of the most competitive and green supercomputers in the world! Such leadership-class system will support European researchers, trade and public sector, in higher understanding and responding to complex challenges and remodeling them into innovation opportunities in sectors like well-being, weather forecasting or urban and rural planning.”