LUMI ranked third on Top500 list of world’s fastest supercomputers – the fastest supercomputer in Europe

EuroHPC Joint Undertaking’s LUMI supercomputer reached the third spot on the latest Top500 list of world’s fastest supercomputers released at the ISC22 conference in Hamburg, Germany on 30 May 2022. LUMI reached a measured High-Performance Linpack (HPL) performance of 151.9 petaflops. This makes LUMI the fastest supercomputer in Europe.

LUMI is a unique endeavour thanks to its scale, sustainability and pan-European nature, hosted by a consortium of ten countries.

The EuroHPC JU is extremely proud to see its first pre-exascale supercomputer reach the third position on the Top500 list. This is the latest tangible success for the EuroHPC initiative and validates the work that the JU is doing to achieve its mission of developing a world-class supercomputing infrastructure in Europe. To see LUMI so well ranked is an incredible result which shows the importance of European collaboration and the impact we can achieve when we work together, says Anders Dam Jensen, Executive Director of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking.

The LUMI consortium is excited about LUMI’s Top500 ranking and is looking forward to seeing LUMI’s remarkable computing power being used for RDI efforts with major societal impact. In addition to being an enabler of scientific breakthroughs and industrial innovation, LUMI will also be a platform for research collaboration allowing for mutual learning and competence development as well as for developing emerging technologies, such as AI and quantum. All these factors together make LUMI a key instrument for Europe’s future success and strategic autonomy, says Kimmo Koski, Managing Director of CSC – IT Center for Science, Finland, on behalf of the LUMI consortium.

LUMI is not only a very powerful supercomputer, it is also an exceptionally green one. It runs on 100% renewable hydroelectricity, uses free cooling and has an advanced waste heat utilisation system with its waste heat being used for local district heating. This makes LUMI’s contribution to Europe’s future all the more remarkable, Koski continues.

The LUMI system is supplied by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), based on an HPE Cray EX supercomputer.

The LUMI supercomputer represents a landmark achievement for Europe that will unlock innovation in critical areas such as drug discovery, healthcare, weather forecasting, and AI-driven initiatives, and power economic growth for European nations and corporations, says Justin Hotard, executive vice president and general manager for HPC & AI, HPE.

It is an honor to closely collaborate with EuroHPC JU, CSC, and AMD to support this mission, and to build the system with HPE Cray EX supercomputers, which deliver next-generation supercomputing and AI capabilities. We celebrate this significant performance milestone for LUMI and look forward to many more, he continues.

LUMI’s second pilot phase for selected users will start in August 2022, and the system will become generally available for users in late September 2022.

We are thrilled to see LUMI among the top systems of the Top500 list – it’s been a while since a supercomputer in Europe has reached such positions. Critical technologies such as HPC, play an ever more important role, and interest towards Europe is increasing. We are eager to see LUMI in its full glory later this year and look forward to a golden era of data-driven scientific discovery in Europe, enabled by LUMI and other EuroHPC systems, says Pekka Manninen, Director of LUMI leadership computing facility, CSC – IT Center for Science, Finland.

LUMI’s GPU partition called LUMI-G wasn’t yet fully installed for this edition of the Top500 list – the expected HPL performance will grow up to 375 petaflops during June 2022.

On the new HPCG list LUMI was also ranked number 3. The HPCG list (High-Performance Conjugate Gradient) benchmark provides an alternative metric for assessing supercomputer performance and is meant to complement the HPL measurement.