- Aug 17, 2014
- 11,112
EuroHPC 's Joint Undertaking recently deployed Europe's first pre-exascale supercomputer, LUMI, in Finland's city of Kajaani. The all-AMD build ranks as the 3rd fastest computer according to the Top500 rankings owing to its 550 Petaflops performance. It also claims the title of the world's third-greenest supercomputer, thanks to the impressive energy efficiency of the Epyc CPUs and CDNA-based MI250X GPUs. According to LUMI, achieving this performance with the world's fastest laptops would require a 23 km-high pile of them - roughly 28 times as high as the world's tallest building, Dubai's Burj Khalifa.
LUMI was engineered to derive 100 percent of its energy from renewable sources. It can be fed up to 200 MW of energy through hydropower, while the supercomputer's waste heat will be repurposed towards the Kajaani district, whose atmospheric temperatures can reach -18 Cº in winter. It's a circular energy consumption topology and opens the doors to truly environmentally-conscious, carbon-negative supercomputing.
LUMI, the result of a 10-country consortium, aims to provide researchers in Europe and across the world with a scalable platform that can supercharge climate-forward computations, medical and artificial intelligence research, and even quantum computing simulations. The underlying software is powered by AMD's ROCm software stack, which stands in contrast to NVIDIA's CUDA thanks to its open-source approach. It also features a translation mechanism that can adapt CUDA-based code to AMD's software stack with minimal software engineering efforts.
LUMI's architecture features a star-like topology with with eight interlinked nodes. (Image credit: LUMI)
All-AMD LUMI Becomes Europe's Most Powerful Supercomputer
With a taste of quantum and a truly environmental-friendly architecture.
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