HPE to Install Czech Republic’s Most Powerful HPC in 2021

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced that IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center, a HPC center for R&D and innovation in the Czech Republic, has been selected to build the country’s most powerful HPC.

The agreement is part of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, an initiative between the EU, European countries and industry technology partners to coordinate and combine their resources to develop exascale HPCs in Europe.

The new HPC, with the working title EURO_IT4I that was given by IT4Innovations, will be powered by HPC and AI solutions from HPE to advance modeling and simulation capabilities and accelerate discovery for ongoing research in science, medicine and engineering.

Example areas that IT4Innovations aims to target by using the system include improving weather forecasting, developing greener and sustainable infrastructure, and drug discovery to find a cure to Covid-19.

“We are pleased to be working together with HPE to contribute to the goal of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking to offer industry-leading HPC and AI technologies and expertise to European and Czech research teams,” said Vit Vondrak, director, IT4Innovations. “HPE is uniquely positioned to provide the complete infrastructure and services that the next era of supercomputing demands, and together we are delivering one of the most powerful HPCs in Europe that will benefit science, industry and society as a whole.“

IT4Innovations’ Ongoing Mission to Become Europe’s Leading HPC Center
IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center is part of VSB – Technical University of Ostrava and together with 2 other institutions, forms e-INFRA CZ, the biggest e-infrastructure for science, research and education in the Czech Republic.

With HPE-powered solutions, it is expanding its R&D resources to enable AI techniques that can improve accuracy and speed up discovery when applied to simulations of complex scientific data. The system will also be faster to perform more calculations with a theoretical peak performance of 15 petaflops, an equivalent to 15 quadrillion floating-point operations per second.

HPE will power the new HPC with the Apollo 2000 and Apollo 6500 systems that are purpose-built to support the combination of HPC workloads, such as modeling and simulation, with AI and other data-intensive applications. It features over 500 NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs and network for targeted AI performance.

The vendor will also include the Apollo 2000 Direct Liquid Cooled System to increase energy efficiency and power density by transferring heat generated by the new HPC with a liquid-cooled process. To further manage data processing and storage from large AI workloads and applications at scale, it will also integrate the Cray ClusterStor E1000 storage system, which utilizes tailored software and hardware features to meet storage requirements of any size and support IT4Innovations’s ongoing data growth.

“HPE delivers the world’s most powerful supercomputing technologies and by being a part of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, we are committed to partnering with national European organizations to power their future pre-exascale and exascale journeys,” said Jan Kamenícek, MD, HPE Czech Republic. “HPE will closely collaborate with IT4Innovations to meet its specific R&D needs with powerful HPC and AI technologies that will increase performance and enable new capabilities for growing data-intensive applications. We look forward supporting their research missions and enable their community to tackle more complex scientific challenges and accelerate innovation.“

IT4Innovations’ EuroHPC petascale system will be shipped and installed in 2021.