The European High Performance Computing Joint Venture (EuroHPC JU) has deployed Europe's most powerful supercomputer in the Finnish city of Kajaani, which is built entirely on AMD hardware.
The system, called Lumi, is ranked the third most powerful supercomputer in the world by the Top500 (opens in a new tab) list of high-performance computers.
Lumi ranks only behind the US Frontier supercomputer, which is based at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the Fugaku supercomputer, which is housed at the RIKEN Center for Computational Science in Fujitsu, Japan.
What makes it special?
Lumi, which means snow in Finnish, boasts a maximum throughput of over 550 petaflops per second.
The supercomputer also has impeccable green credentials, using 100% renewable materials for its power and ranking third on the GREEN500 list (opens in a new tab) of the most environmentally friendly supercomputers.
Although it is the largest system in Europe, LUMI has an energy yield of 51,63 gigaflops/watt and can be supplied with up to 200 MW of its power through hydroelectricity.
Furthermore, heat losses from the supercomputer would be redirected to the Kajaani district, where temperatures can reach -18C in winter.
What's it for?
Lumi's resources will be used for research in areas such as climate change, medicine, artificial intelligence and quantum computing.
One fifth of its resources will be reserved for the use of SMEs according to EuroHPC JU.
“The social problems for which we use supercomputers exist on a global scale. The scale of these challenges and the work required to address them and turn them into innovation opportunities requires extensive collaboration between many branches of academia and countless research teams,” said Anders Dam Jensen, CEO of EuroHPC JU.
The bill for the entire project amounted to 202 million euros.
More than half of the funding for the project came from the EU, with some contributions also from individual Member States.
AMD continues to roll out new high-performance computing hardware.
The company recently confirmed that a next-generation multi-chip, multi-IP Instinct CDNA 4 accelerator is currently under development and is expected to launch in 2023, known as the Instinct MI300 GPU.