HPE Wins $160 Million+ Contract With European HPC Joint Undertaking in Finland

Hewlett Packard Enterprise has been awarded a contract of more than $160 million by the European HPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) to build one of the world’s fastest HPCs that will be based in Finland.

The new HPC, which EuroHPC JU refers to as LUMI, will help European researchers and private and public organizations R&D and drive innovation in areas such as healthcare, weather forecasting, and AI-enabled products.

EuroHPC JU’s 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 leap in supercomputing that will deliver 5-10x 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 HPCs on the planet,” said Peter Ungaro, SVP and GM, HPC and mission critical solutions, HPE. “We are committed to supporting the European HPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) to seize opportunities in next-gen 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.“

HPE Powers one of the World’s Fastest Pre-Exascale HPCs for Europe
The EuroHPC JU’s LUMI will be powered by HPE Cray EX supercomputers featuring next-gen AMD EPYC CPUs and AMD Instinct GPUs to deliver 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 consortium includes Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Poland, Sweden, and Switzerland.

The new system will be available in mid-2021.
“Once operational in mid-2021, the LUMI HPC will be one of the most competitive and green HPCs in the world,” said Anders Dam Jensen, executive director, EuroHPC JU. “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.“

“AMD is proud to join with HPE to power the upcoming LUMI HPC to advance scientific research in AI, weather forecasting, pharmaceutical discovery, and more,” said Forrest Norrod, SVP and GM, data center and embedded systems group, Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. “Our next-gen AMD EPYC CPUs and AMD Instinct GPUs, coupled with HPE’s unique supercomputing technologies, are fueling new capabilities in HPC, and we are excited to strengthen the European research community through our support.“

HPE Accelerates Europe’s Path to Achieving Exascale Computing
HPE is delivering powerful supercomputing and AI technologies to advance EuroHPC JU’s mission in adopting next-gen supercomputing, which includes pre-exascale and exascale systems. EuroHPC JU’s LUMI is the second system that was contracted to HPE to build, following the Euro_I4TI system for IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center in Ostrava that will be the Czech Republic’s most powerful HPC.

HPE will also expand its supercomputing supply chain in Europe by manufacturing liquid-cooled HPE Cray EX HPCs and HPE Apollo Systems in its Kutná Hora factory in the Czech Republic. Additionally, HPE will also establish a center of excellence in Europe that will provide R&D tools and expertise to develop and test applications, programming, processors and other solutions required to build an exascale readiness program.

Through the investment of these systems and technologies, EuroHPC JU aims to bolster R&D and innovation to advance science, boost industrial competitiveness, and secure Europe’s technological sovereignty.

HPE Powers EuroHPC JU’s LUMI with End-to-End Supercomputing and AI Solutions
EuroHPC JU’s LUMI will be built using Cray EX HPCs, which will also be used in the 3 upcoming exascale systems for the US Department of Energy: Aurora at Argonne National Laboratory, Frontier at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and El Capitan at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

The Cray EX HPCs will integrate the following compute, storage, networking and cooling technologies that are purpose-built for the exascale Era, to power LUMI:

• Powerful compute with targeted AI capabilities using next-gen AMD EPYC CPUs and AMD Instinct GPUs.
• Expanded storage to support complex workloads in modeling, simulation and AI using Cray ClusterStor E1000 storage system.
• HPE Slingshot for purpose-built HPC networking to address demands for higher speed and congestion control for data-intensive workloads.
• Direct liquid cooling capabilities for larger scale systems to increase overall efficiency in electricity and water usage used to operate the system.