The LUMI supercomputer (which means snow in Finnish) has just been inaugurated in Finland. In addition to being the fastest, it is also the most economical in Europe. It should display a peak performance of 550 petaflops and place third in the ranking of the best supercomputers in the world (far behind Frontier, the American exascale supercomputer)
A supercomputer powered by renewable energy
With such performance, LUMI will be able to meet great challenges, particularly in the fields of medicine or the fight against climate change. The particularity of this supercomputer is that it is entirely powered by renewable energy. Its energy consumption is 2.9 MW. To operate, LUMI uses natural cooling systems. Its waste heat will heat about 20% of the homes in the town of Kajaani.
This supercomputer was created thanks to the collaboration between the European Joint Undertaking for High Performance Computing (EuroHPC) and a consortium of ten European countries, including Finland, Belgium, Sweden and Switzerland. LUMI is only the first major project resulting from this alliance. In effect, Europe does not intend to stop there. Three other EuroHPC supercomputers are under construction: Leonardo in Italy, Deucalion in Portugal and MareNostrum 5 in Spain.
The United States takes first place in the world ranking of supercomputers
LUMI will contribute to meeting major societal challenges
LUMI will have cost 202 million euros. Half of this amount was provided by the European Union, a quarter by Finland, and the rest came from other European funds. This supercomputer is based on the HPE Cray EX system. It is made up of two blocks: the first includes 2560 knots, each consisting of a custom 64-core AMD EPYC Trento processor and four AMD Instinct MI250X. The second block, called LUMI-C, contains only 64-core AMD EPYC Milan processors in 1,536 two-socket nodes with 256 GB to 1 TB of RAM.
Margrethe Vestager, European Commissioner designate for Digital Europe and Competition, has followed this project very closely. She said that “LUMI can be used for work in the fields of medicine and climate research. It could be the development of vaccines, cancer diagnostics or climate change mitigation, said the Commissioner , This is a great example of the enormous potential of artificial intelligence to improve our lives “. The European Commission has planned to invest 7.5 billion euros in the next generation of supercomputers.