Have you ever thought about how people could build a supercomputer and how many would be involved in this project? Finland, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Iceland, Norway, Poland, Sweden, and Switzerland are the countries that took part in this super project, and they chose Finland to host it. Finland has the best climate for this supercomputer as it will allow it to cool down quickly and reuse the waste heat to heat the area where it is located. LUMI (Large Unified Modern Infrastructure) won’t impact the environment as they plan to use power from their hydropower plants. Everything is focused on having no impact on the environment.
What is the Use?
Hewlett Packard (HP) has announced a $160 million contract to create it. LUMI will be one of the leading technological tools available in Europe. It will allow research to be accelerated for various scientific endeavors, mainly thanks to its speed in performing artificial intelligence and machine learning calculations. These enable us to tackle some of the many challenges humanity faces, such as climate change, the fight against COVID-19, and medical research in general. It will also be used for the study of autonomous driving algorithms, as well as for research in the social sciences. The supercomputer will be the size of a tennis court and weigh 150,000 kg, with computing power equivalent to 1.5 million laptops. Luckily, you don’t need a supercomputer to play NetBet casino. You can even play from your mobile all the popular games like Book of the Dead and Starburst.
LUMI is characterized as a “pre-exascale” system that will have a maximum theoretical computing power of over 550 petaflops, which is equivalent to more than half an exaflop, a measurement used in exascale computing. Also, through its partnership with EuroHPC JU, HP is expanding supercomputer resources to accelerate the European roadmap to achieving “exascale computing,” which is the next major leap in supercomputing, expected to deliver faster performance times from current systems.
Technically, LUMI is based on the HP Cray EX architecture. It can be based on approximately 200,000 AMD EPYC cores, 32 TB of memory, and an AMD Instinct GPU. The storage is assigned to a 7 Petabyte flash memory drive combined with a traditional 80 petabyte Luster file system and an additional 30 PB Ceph storage, for a total of 117 petabytes of space. The data transfer rate reaches an impressive two terabytes per second.
“Once launched in mid-2021, the LUMI supercomputer will be one of the most competitive and green supercomputers in the world!” Anders Dam Jensen said, Executive Director of EuroHPC JU. Such a state-of-the-art system will support European researchers, industry and the public sector, for better understanding and responding to complex challenges and turning them into innovation opportunities in areas such as health, weather forecasting or urban and rural design.
“AMD is proud to cooperate with the HPE to power the upcoming supercomputer LUMI to promote scientific research in Artificial Intelligence, weather forecasts, pharmaceutical innovations, and more,” Forrest Norrod said, Senior Vice President and General Manager, ata center and embedded systems group, AMD. “The processors AMD EPYC next generation and GPU AMD Instinct coupled with its unique supercomputing technologies. HPE will provide new capabilities in high-performance computing and we are excited to strengthen the European research community through our support from the joint team developed by LUMI.”
Its design started in November 2019, and it is expected that the data center that will host it will be ready by the end of 2020, making it operational from the first months of 2021. All we have to do is wait and see this how this wonder of technology will help humanity in practical ways and not only in theory.