Its name is LUMI and is installed in Kajaani, Finland. Only a third of it is operational, but even this, with a peak performance of 151.9 PFlop/s, has earned it third place in the ranking of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, and even gold in Europe. We are talking about the long-awaited European supercomputer star - the LUMI supercomputer. It offers part of its computational resources to the scientific community in the Czech Republic thanks to the membership of IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center, which is part of VSB - Technical University of Ostrava, in the consortium building this supercomputer.
The LUMI supercomputer is already fully providing its users with its non-accelerated part. The second pilot phase of the LUMI system will be launched for selected users in August 2022, and the system will be generally available to users by the end of September 2022. The LUMI supercomputer represents a breakthrough achievement for Europe, which will foster innovation in key areas such as the design of new materials, medical applications and drug design, weather forecasting and climate change, and research into artificial intelligence and its applications in practice. The LUMI supercomputer will support the economic growth of European countries and industries thanks to its computing power and the expertise of the team that will run it.
Czech scientists will also gain access to one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world thanks to the membership of IT4Innovations Supercomputing Center in the LUMI consortium. "Ten European countries, including the Czech Republic, are involved in this unique cooperation. The scientific communities of all ten participating countries will be able to regularly apply for computational resources of the LUMI supercomputer. They will be provided free of charge, based on the assessment of projects by an expert committee," says Vít Vondrák, Managing Director of IT4Innovations, explaining the principle of providing computational resources, which is also practiced in the case of the Ostrava supercomputing centre. In addition to the Czech Republic, the consortium also includes Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland, and, of course, Finland as the coordinator.
Like the most powerful Czech Karolina supercomputer, which was acquired as part of the pan-European EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, LUMI received its first-ever ranking in the TOP500 list on 30th May 2022 during the ISC 2022 conference in Hamburg, Germany. Commenting on this achievement, Anders Dam Jensen, Executive Director of EuroHPC JU: "We are extremely proud that Europe's first pre-exascale supercomputer has been ranked third in the TOP500. This is the latest tangible achievement of the EuroHPC initiative, confirming the efforts we are making to achieve our mission of developing a world-class supercomputing infrastructure in Europe."
The LUMI supercomputer also defended its excellent position in another alternative benchmark, the HPCG list, where it ranked third after the Japanese Fugaku and the American Summit supercomputer.
In terms of energy efficiency, which is also monitored by the Green500 list, the LUMI supercomputer also came out on top, precisely in third place. "LUMI is not only a high-performance but also an extremely environmentally friendly supercomputer. It runs on fully renewable hydropower, uses free cooling, and has an advanced waste heat recovery system, with its waste heat being used for local district heating. This makes its contribution to the future of Europe even more remarkable," commented Kimmo Koski, Managing Director of CSC - IT Center for Science, Finland, on behalf of the LUMI consortium. The first and second place in the Green500 list went to the US Frontier supercomputer, which is the world's most powerful supercomputer ever and the first ever to break the magic 1 exaflop level.
The LUMI supercomputer, which was supplied by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, will be fully available to users by the end of September 2022, with an inauguration ceremony to be held before then, on Monday 13th June 2022 in Kajaani, Finland. The event will be live-streamed. For further information, keep an eye on the www.lumi-supercomputer.euwebsite.
