Monday, October 26, 2020

HPE to build pre-exascale supercomputer in Finland based on AMD

The European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) selected Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to build one of the world’s fastest supercomputers that will be based in Finland. The contract was valued at over $160 million.

The new supercomputer, which EuroHPC JU refers to as "LUMI," will have a theoretical peak performance of more than 550 petaflops, which is equivalent to the performance of 1.5 million laptops combined. LUMI will be powered by HPE Cray EX supercomputers featuring next-generation AMD EPYC CPUs and AMD Instinct GPUs to deliver unprecedented performance and targeted deep learning capabilities to advance the combination of modeling, simulation, analytics and AI workloads to solve complex research.

Additionally, through its collaboration with EuroHPC JU, HPE is expanding supercomputing resources to accelerate the European roadmap to achieve exascale computing, which is the next significant leap in supercomputing that will deliver 5-10 times faster performance than today’s systems.

“We are honored to be selected for LUMI and leverage our exascale era technologies to build one of the fastest supercomputers on the planet,” said Peter Ungaro, senior vice president and general manager, High Performance Computing (HPC) and Mission Critical Solutions (MCS), HPE. “We are committed to supporting the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) to seize opportunities in next-generation supercomputing to bolster research in science, advance innovation and unlock economic growth. We are excited to collaborate with the EuroHPC JU, and through our partnership with AMD, leverage our unique capabilities in compute, high performance networking, storage and software to help improve the way people live and work.”

EuroHPC JU’s LUMI will be hosted in CSC – IT Center for Science in Kajaani, Finland and will be shared by ten European countries as part of the newly formed LUMI consortium. The consortium includes Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Poland, Sweden, and Switzerland.