AMD just announced their association with HPE on a 160+ Million USD contract to make one the of world’s Fastest Supercomputer, LUMI in Finland. They will be using their AMD Instinct GPU and EPYC CPU to make the LUMI Supercomputer. This is a most significant feather in the crown of AMD since Nvidia acquired ARM Electronics specifically for building supercomputers but they didn’t get the contract.
The @LUMIhpc will be powered by @HPE_Cray EX supercomputers featuring next-generation AMD #EPYC CPUs and @AMD Instinct GPUs to deliver theoretical peak performance of more than 550 petaflops, equivalent to the performance of 1.5 million laptops combined.
— AMD EPYC (@AMDServer) October 21, 2020
AMD will be contributing the main processor hardware AMD Instinct GPU where HPE will provide the Networking and Store System. Below are the details about the Specs of LUMI Supercomputer.
What is LUMI ?
The full abbreviation of LUMI is Large Unified Modern Infrastructure, it is a Supercomputer currently being built by Hewlett Packard Enterprise in association with Advanced Micro Devices. It will be running in CSC’s main Data Center in Kajaani, Finland. EuroHPC or European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking is being tasked with supervising the consortium which includes Finland, Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Norway, Poland, Iceland Sweden, the Czech Republic, and Switzerland.
LUMI Processor with AMD EPYC :
Lumi will be powered by AMD EPYC CPU, next generation processors specially made for this Super Computer. At peak performance, this can deliver 550+ Petaflops / Second execution. This is way more advanced to even compare with the latest Ryzen 5000 series CPUs, which are currently best of mainstream stable processors money can buy. The memory bandwidth, compute units and clock speed are still to be announced by AMD.
LUMI Graphics Processor with AMD Instinct:
LUMI will have AMD Instinct Graphic Accelerators, which are currently the best for AMD Machine Learning. There are currently 4 models of AMD Instinct GPUs out there –
- AMD Radeon Instinct MI50 Accelerator
- AMD Radeon Instinct MI25 Accelerator
- AMD Radeon Instinct MI8 Accelerator
- AMD Radeon Instinct MI6 Accelerator
- *Upcoming AMD Instinct MI100
But AMD announced they will be using next generation of Instinct Graphic Accelerator, possibly the leaked AMD Radeon Instinct MI100, which has not been confirmed yet. The new model of AMD Instinct GPU will have far advanced gpu power than high performance computing of AMD Radeon RX 6000 GPU.
LUMI Storage with ClusterStor E1000:
Lumi will have a 117 Petabyte Storage, on Cray ClusterStor E1000 storage system manufactured by HPE. This is similar to a 1,17,000 numbers of storage of 1TB HDD. The aggregated bandwidth of the purpose built Storage is around 2 TB / second. Combined with AMD Instinct GPU and EPYC CPU, this will be one of the fastest supercomputers out there.
LUMI Networking with HPE Slingshot:
Hewlett Packard Enterprise has specially built the HPE Slingshot for the Cray supercomputing system. It has capability to transfer over 1.2 billion packets per second per port. It will be air cooled with 100GbE and 200GbE interfaces, with a 64-port switch capable of 12.8 Tb/second data transfer speed.
LUMI Supercomputer Cooling :
Lumi will have 200MW power, supplied by hydropowered energy resources. Lumi will be completely air cooled, advantage of the location in Kajaani, the green home of this Supercomputer. It will be passively cooled by the thermal heat exhaust system.
LUMI Supercomputer Uses :
LUMI will be used by the nations of Europe and EuroHPC for a variation of purposes, like research and learning, artificial intelligence to economical growth. The industry of healthcare and weather forecasting will also be benefitted from LUMI. The list of use LUMI can offer can be materialized only after it is built in 2021.
If you have any query or question about the topic, please feel free to post in a comment below.