HPE Wins Contract to Power one of the World’s Fastest Supercomputers

Hewlett Packard Enterprise has been awarded a contract of more than $160 million by the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) to build one of the world’s fastest supercomputers that will be based in Finland. The new supercomputer, called “LUMI,“ will help European researchers and private and public organizations advance R&D and drive innovation in areas such as healthcare, weather forecasting, and AI-enabled products.

LUMI is characterized as a “pre-exascale“ system that will have a theoretical peak performance of more than 550 petaflops, which is equivalent to the performance of 1.5 million laptops combined. Additionally, through its collaboration with EuroHPC JU, HPE is expanding supercomputing resources to accelerate the European roadmap to achieve exascale computing, which is the next significant leap in supercomputing that will deliver 5-10 times faster performance than today’s systems.

“We are honored to be selected for LUMI and leverage our exascale era technologies to build one of the fastest supercomputers on the planet,“ said Peter Ungaro, senior vice president and general manager of High Performance Computing and Mission Critical Solutions at HPE. “We are committed to supporting the EuroHPC JU to seize opportunities in next-generation supercomputing to bolster research in science, advance innovation and unlock economic growth. We are excited to collaborate with the EuroHPC JU, and through our partnership with AMD, leverage our unique capabilities in compute, high performance networking, storage and software to help improve the way people live and work.“

LUMI will be powered by HPE Cray EX supercomputers featuring next-generation AMD EPYC CPUs and AMD Instinct GPUs to deliver unprecedented performance and targeted deep learning capabilities to advance the combination of modeling, simulation, analytics and AI workloads to solve complex research. It will be hosted in CSC - IT Center for Science in Kajaani, Finland and will be shared by ten European countries as part of the newly formed LUMI consortium. The new system will be available in mid-2021.

“Once operational in mid-2021, the LUMI supercomputer will be one of the most competitive and green supercomputers in the world!“ said Anders Dam Jensen, Executive Director of EuroHPC Joint Undertaking. “Such leadership-class system will support European researchers, industry and public sector, in better understanding and responding to complex challenges and transforming them into innovation opportunities in sectors like health, weather forecasting or urban and rural planning.“