The world's third most powerful and Europe's number one supercomputer is fully operational and accepted as of February 2023. The second pilot phase of the LUMI supercomputer with the GPU partition has been completed. LUMI is now officially ready to fully serve the European as well as the Czech scientific community.
The LUMI pre-exascale supercomputer was built thanks to the cooperation of ten European countries, including the Czech Republic. It was acquired within the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, just like the Czech Republic's most powerful Karolina supercomputer. It is installed in Kajaani, Finland, and was supplied by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. As early as May 2022, LUMI was ranked 3rd in the TOP500 and Green500 lists of the most powerful and energy-efficient supercomputers, respectively, and received and still holds the top position in Europe.
Czech scientists also have access to the LUMI supercomputer thanks to the membership of the national supercomputing centre IT4Innovations, which is part of the VSB – Technical University of Ostrava, in the LUMI consortium. The Czech scientific community can apply for LUMI computational resources within the framework of open access grant competitions, which IT4Innovations announces three times a year, completely free of charge. However, IT4Innovations' involvement in the LUMI consortium is about more than just access to its computational resources. From the beginning, it has been actively involved in the implementation as part of its management structure, providing expert support to users within LUST (LUMI user support team), developing software tools such as HyperQueue that enable users to use the available computational resources of the supercomputer efficiently.
"The Czech Republic's share of the LUMI computational resources available to its scientific community is more than 2.2 million GPU hours per year. LUMI can therefore be considered the most powerful supercomputer available in the country. The interest of the Czech scientific community in LUMI is gradually growing, and we are thus able to cover the demand for computational resources on our supercomputers fully," says Branislav Jansík, Supercomputing Services Director at IT4Innovations.
All 10,240 GPUs of the LUMI supercomputer met the target performance, and the system was fully available to users in December 2022. Full acceptance was also achieved in early February. Its projected theoretical peak performance is 550 PFlop/s, equivalent to the performance of 1.5 million of the latest laptops. Hydroelectric power is used to power LUMI, and the waste heat it produces contributes 20% to the district heating of the area.
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