LUMI, Europe’s most powerful supercomputer inaugurated

LUMI, the fastest supercomputer in Europe with a current performance of 151.9 petaflops – which is expected to be increased to 375 petaflops within weeks – has been inaugurated, and debuted at the third spot on the latest TOP500  ranking list of the world. This is fantastic news in itself, but LUMI, which has been installed in the data centre of the CSC – IT Center for Science, Kajaani, Finland is unique and exemplary due to other reasons too.

Common success
LUMI (Large Unified Modern Infrastructure; ’snow’ in Finnish) is the first pre-exascale supercomputer of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, and is operated by a consortium of 10 countries including Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Poland, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland. This is the first time in the history of supercomputers that the participating European countries finance a tool in another country. Such cooperation efforts already have serious traditions in the field of HPC education, user support, and data management services; and with the arrival of LUMI, the HPC ecosystem is now complete and enables joint research, knowledge sharing, and the development of competencies.

green on the top
Although Spain and Italy were the candidates with the highest odds at the call of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, ultimately the LUMI consortium treating sustainability and energy -efficiency as a high -priority became the first winner. LUMI also emerges as a supercomputer with environmental-friendly solutions among supercomputers typically characterised by enormous energy demands because it is not only the fastest, but the most economical supercomputer in Europe. Thanks to the local climate characteristics, the cooling of the computer requires very little energy, and it is located at the site of a former paper factory, and therefore, parts of the required infrastructure were already in place. LUMI operates using environmental-friendly hydroelectricity only – up to 200MW of hydroelectric power is available to it. Its waste heat is used to ensure about 20% of the district heating of Kajaani, thereby reducing the annual carbon dioxide emission of the city by 12.400 tons, which is equal to the emission of 4000 cars. Thus, it is not surprising that LUMI having a ratio of 51.6 gigaflops/Watt also ranked third on the Green500 list; Anders Dam Jensen, the managing director of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking commented on this saying that “LUM’s green performance is the beginning of a new era of environmental-friendly supercomputers”.

LUMI, the catalyser
LUMI opens up new opportunities for Europe researchers, who may submit applications from all over the continent. Thanks to the amazing computing capacity it has, results are born much more quickly, and larger or more accurate than ever models can be tested. Owing to this performance, supercomputing may appear in previously unreachable territories thereby creating a chance for great scientific breakthroughs. LUMI’s primary mission is to support R&D&I projects with significant social effects such as the extremely computation-intensive Destination Earth project modelling the digital twin of our Earth, which looks for answers related to climate change. Nevertheless, it is also worth noting that 20% of the capacities of LUMI will be reserved for businesses pursuing industrial research and development activities.

The future is here!
LUMI will be available to the users by late September 2022. The computing capacity of the complete infrastructure will be more than 550 petaflops, which is seven times higher than that of the previously fastest computer in Europe (JUWELS, Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany) and will supersede even Fugaku, which has led the list for 2 years. Furthermore, LUMI will not remain unique because it is only the first of the three pre-exascale supercomputers of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking. The plans foresee the arrival of Leonardo  in Italy and finally the arrival of MareNostrum5 in Spain thereby securing Europe’s place on the cutting-edge of supercomputing.