European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) has deployed Europe’s most powerful supercomputer in the Finnish city of Kajaani, which is entirely made from AMD hardware.
The system, dubbed Lumi, is ranked as the third most powerful supercomputer worldwide according to the Top500 (opens in new tab) list of high-performance computers.
Lumi only falls behind the US supercomputer Frontier, which is based in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Supercomputer Fugaku, which is kept in the RIKEN Center for Computational Science in Fujitsu, Japan.
What makes it special?
Lumi – which is Finnish for Snow – boasts peak performance of more than 550 petaflops per second.
The supercomputer also has impeccable green credentials, reportedly using 100 per cent renewable material for its energy and ranking third in the GREEN500 list (opens in new tab) of most environmentally friendly supercomputers.
Despite being the largest system in Europe, LUMI has a power efficiency rating of 51.63 gigaflops/watt, and can be fed with up to 200 MW of its energy via hydropower.
In addition, the supercomputer’s heat waste will reportedly be repurposed towards the Kajaani district, where temperatures can reach -18 Cº in winter.
What is it used for?
Lumi’s resources will be used for research in fields such as climate change, medicine, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing.
A fifth of its resources will be reserved for use by SMEs according to EuroHPC JU.
“The societal challenges for which we use super computers exist on a global scale. The extent of these challenges, and the work required to tackle and transform them into innovation opportunities, requires much collaboration across many branches of academia and countless research teams,” said Anders Dam Jensen, executive director of the EuroHPC JU.
The bill for the entire project came to €202 million.
Over half of the funding for the project came from the EU, with some contributions also coming from individual member states.
AMD is continuing to rollout new high performance computing hardware.
The company recently confirmed that a next-gen CDNA 4 multi-chip and multi-IP Instinct accelerator is currently in development and scheduled to launch by 2023, known as the Instinct MI300 GPU.
