A network of countries from Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland and the Czech Republic is building the LUMI supercomputer as part of the EU funding project EuroHPC. By the end 2021 it should go fully online with a peak computing power of 552 PetaFlops and expected 375 PetaFlops in the common Linpack benchmark – this corresponds to 375 to 552 Quadrillion floating point operations per second with double precision (FP 64).

According to the announcement, not yet presented processors and GPU accelerators from AMD will be used. Epyc – 7003 – CPUs with Zen 3 technology and Radeon Instinct cards with a CDNA architecture designed for compute, including AI functions, fit the schedule. We’re talking about more than 200. 000 CPU -Cores consisting of 64 – core processors. HPE takes over the construction in Kajaani, Finland.

Globally at the fore LUMI would start today, it would be one of the two fastest supercomputers in the world – currently number 1 in the top 500 – the Japanese Fungaku has a top computing performance of 514 PFlops or 416 Linpack-PFlops. In the coming year, however, more supercomputers will go into operation, including the exascale Frontier system (also with AMD hardware), but LUMI will still be one of the fastest in the world.

The EU controls half of a good 200 million euros for the construction and operation and thus secures 50 Percentage of the computing power, the other half comes from the responsible national association, whose members have partial access to the supercomputer. You can decide for yourself which calculations run on LUMI.

Like the Italian EuroHPC supercomputer Leonardo, the system is primarily intended for weather simulations (keyword: climate change) and for research into diseases. The industry has access to materials research, among other things.

The research association CINECA combines Intel’s Xeon processors with Nvidia’s Ampere GPU accelerators A 100. At similar costs, the supercomputer should be about half the FP 64 – computing power like LUMI