EuroHPC’s idea is to create a regional supercomputer network to serve as an engine to “drive Europe’s data economy”. The consortium plans to apply artificial intelligence and data analytics to a variety of business and scientific applications, tackling issues like COVID-19 and climate change and designing more advanced airplanes, cars, drugs and materials.
These large systems are part of EuroHPC (European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking), a joint collaboration between governments and the European Union aimed at building one of the world’s most advanced supercomputing ecosystems in Europe. The MareNostrum of Barcelona belongs to this same network .
Each of these new supercomputers will feature Nvidia’s latest A100 Tensor Core high-performance graphics processing units, which are based on the company’s modular DGX SuperPOD architecture and are specifically designed for artificial intelligence workloads. They also use Nvidia’s Mellanox HDR InfiniBand networks for high-performance, low-latency network connectivity.
Artificial Intelligence behind Leonardo
One of these new systems is ” Leonardo ” which, according to Nvidia, is the most powerful artificial intelligence supercomputer in the world. It features nearly 14,000 NVIDIA Ampere architecture GPUs and 200Gbps InfiniBand HDR networking to deliver up to 10 exaflops of AI performance.
Researchers at Cineca (an Italian non-profit consortium that develops advanced information technology applications and services in which this great computer is located) will use the power of Leonardo for scientific questions, such as the simulation of planetary forces behind the climate change and molecular movements within a coronavirus. The center is also involved in Quantum Espresso , an open source code set for modeling materials at the nanoscale for jobs like designing better batteries.
The other three supercomputers will be built in the Czech Republic, Luxembourg and Slovenia. MeluXina in Luxembourg will feature 800 Nvidia A100 GPUs and offer 500 petaflops of AI performance. It will be used for both commercial applications and scientific research in healthcare, financial services and manufacturing.
Meanwhile, in Slovenia, the new Vega supercomputer will be housed at the Institute of Information Sciences or IZUM in Maribor, with 240 Nvidia A100 GPUs.
The Czech system, which has not yet been named, will be built by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and will be hosted at the IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center in Ostrava. It will feature 560 Nvidia A100 GPUs and deliver 350 petaflops of AI performance, seven times its current performance. EuroHPC said it will be available to both academic researchers and industrial users for simulations, data analysis and artificial intelligence.
Countries that will have another supercomputer
These four new supercomputers are not the only ones on the European horizon. In fact, EuroHPC plans to build four more large systems , which will also be based on the Nvidia architecture.
One of them will be in Spain, Bulgaria, Finland and Portugal. The acquisition and maintenance of a system powered solely by green energy is planned , including the reuse of heat. In fact, the goal is to make it an “iconic supercomputer” in this regard. Marenostrum 5 will serve a large group of user communities and has a budget of more than 151 million euros. It is expected that they can be ready by 2027.