What will the LUMI supercomputer do?

LUMI (snow translated from Finnish) will be used primarily to solve important issues for society, including research in climate change, medicine, life sciences and more. The system will be used in applications related to high performance computing (HPC), artificial intelligence and data analytics, as well as in areas where they intersect.

For some users, the supercomputer will be in the second pilot phase in August, and the full-fledged system will be generally available in late September.

The €202 million supercomputer is owned by EuroHPC (JU). Half of this amount was provided by the European Union, a quarter by Finland and the rest by other members of a consortium of 10 countries. As of May 30, LUMI ranked third in the list of the world’s fastest TOP500 supercomputers. Its current capacity is 151.9 Pflops with a power consumption of 2.9 MW.

A little more about Europe’s most powerful supercomputer

LUMI is based on the HPE Cray EX system. The system consists of two complexes. The accelerator unit contains 2,560 units, each consisting of a 64-core custom AMD EPYC Trento processor and four AMD Instinct MI250X. The second unit, called LUMI-C, contains only 64-core AMD EPYC Milan CPUs in 1536 dual-slot nodes with 256GB to 1TB of RAM.

LUMI also has 64 NVIDIA A40 GPUs and nodes with increased memory (up to 32TB per cluster) used to display workloads. LUMI storage is based on Luster: Cray ClusterStor E1000 with 8 Pbytes SSD + 80 Pbytes HDD. In the near future, the supercomputer will receive additional nodes.

Upon completion of all work, the performance of the supercomputer is expected to increase to approximately 375 Pflops, with peak performance potentially exceeding 550 Pflops. The total area of ​​the complex will be approximately 300 m², and energy consumption will rise to 8.5 MW. But the stock on the site is solid – it can take up to 200 MW from hydroelectric power stations. After the computer cools, the heat released is used to heat local homes.