Finland May Soon Be Home To The Fastest Supercomputer In The World

The LUMI Supercomputer seems on track to surpass Japan's Supercomputer Fugaku in the speed demon derby.

We saw in June 28's "The New Top500 List Of The World's Fastest Supercomputers Is Out (AMD; NVDA)" that Fugaku had retained the top position:

The Japanese supercomputer Fugaku held onto the top spot on the list. A system codeveloped by Riken and Fujitsu, Fugaku has an HPL benchmark score of 442 Pflop/s. This performance exceeds the No. 2 Summit by 3x...

The LUMI press release of October 21, 2020 leads off:

One of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, LUMI, will start its operations in CSC’s data center in Kajaani, Finland, next year. The peak performance of LUMI is an astonishing 552 petaflop/s. To date, the world’s fastest computer, Fugaku in Japan, reaches peak performance of 513 petaflop/s. When LUMI’s operations start next year, it will be one of the world’s fastest supercomputers.....

One quick note, the Japanese machine Rpeak is 537 petaflops.

While the LUMI machine will not be tested to Top500 standards until, at the earliest when the next list is released at year's end, and more likely the June 2022 list, the EU consortium behind the project seem confident enough to have chosen the first users/projects for time on the machine later this year per the June 1st press release:

LUMI pilot projects selected

1.6.2021

The projects for the first pilot phase of LUMI have been selected and the pilots will start to run on the CPU partition of LUMI in September 2021.

The first pilot phase aims to test the scalability of the CPU partition and generate workloads on the CPUs, particularly to stress test the storage systems for stability testing. Furthermore, the aim is to provide early access to LUMI to obtain feedback from the pilot users before the launch of LUMI’s regular operations.

The selected projects for the pilot phase were chosen from the LUMI consortium countries and are presenting various disciplines:

• Belgium: Michel Rasquin (Cenaero), Thomas Toulorge (Cenaero) and Koen Hillewaert (University of Liège & Cenaero), Direct Numerical Simulations of a Smoothed Backward Facing Step Featuring Incipient Separation
• Belgium: Giovanni Lapenta (KU Leuven, Department of Mathematics, Center for mathematical Plasma-Astrophysics), LIFTHRASIR: LumI First Tests of the HaRdware Architecture by Simulations of Interplanetary Regions
• Czech Republic: Dominik Legut (VSB – Technical University of Ostrava), Understanding the Physics of Phonons utilizing electronic structure and atomistic calculations employing state-of-the-art methods
• Czech Republic: Denys Biriukov (Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry, AS CR), Interaction network in extracellular space: an all-atom simulation model of the glycocalyx and cell membrane
• Denmark: Ove Christiansen and Jonas Elm (Aarhus University): High Performance Computing Quantum Chemistry on LUMI
• Denmark: Gert Frølund Pedersen and Ondrej Franek (Aalborg University): Perfect Antennas for Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (PARIS)
• Estonia: Triin Laisk and Reedik Mägi (Estonian Genome Centre): Genetic Susceptibility Factors of Different Traits
• Estonia: Germo Väli (Dep. of Marine Systems at TalTech), High-Resolution Ocean Model for Main Basins of The Baltic Sea
• Finland: Minna Palmroth (University of Helsinki), LUmi – Carrington Kinetic simulations (LUCK)
• Finland: Shreyas Kaptan (University of Helsinki), Molecular Basis of Intelligence (MOLiNT)
• Iceland: Hannes Jónsson (University of Iceland), Computational Chemistry
• Iceland: Henning Úlfarsson (University of Reykjavik), Algorithmic Mathematics
• Norway: Mats Carlsson (Rosseland Centre for Solar Physics, University of Oslo), Solar Atmospheric Modelling
• Norway: Mats Bentsen (NORCE research institute), Computing for nationally coordinated NorESM experiments
• Sweden: Oscar Agertz and Florent Renaud (Lund University), The baryon cycle in colliding galaxies
• Sweden: Philipp Schlatter (KTH) and Jonathan Vincent (PDC) and Jing Gong (EuroHPC CC Sweden), Turbulence data generation on Boeing hump
• Switzerland: Nicola Marzari (EPFL, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne), High-throughput computing

In addition, there will be yet to be announced projects from Poland.

Operations of LUMI starting in two phases

LUMI will be installed in two phases: in the first phase, during summer 2021, the CPU partition and storage systems will be deployed.

The second installation phase towards the end of the year will bring LUMI to its full grandeur including the GPU partition.

Both installation phases will be concluded with short pilot and acceptance phases. So LUMI will be in full swing in early 2022 but the CPU partition will be available already earlier during autumn 2021. Together with the CPU capacities, LUMI will feature an Early Access Platform for preparing applications for the GPU partition. LUMI welcomes further early adopter projects from all LUMI consortium countries after the first phase of pilots has been completed.