Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. has landed a contract to build a 550-plus-petaflop supercomputer that will support research initiatives across ten European countries.

The project, announced today, is valued at more than $160 million.

The supercomputer is dubbed LUMI and will be shared by Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Poland, Sweden and Switzerland. It will be housed in Finland’s CSC – IT Center for Science facility.

The 550-plus petaflops of processing power set to be offered by LUMI, which HPE describes as the system’s theoretical peak performance, will be used to support research in fields including healthcare, weather forecasting and artificial intelligence. A single petaflop equals a million billion calculations per second.

HPE said it will build LUMI with chips from Advanced Micro Devices Inc.’s Epyc line of central processing units and Instinct line of graphics cards. The supercomputer will be based on the company’s Cray EX liquid-cooled supercomputer design. It will use HPE Slingshot switches for networking and hold data using the company’s recently introduced Cray ClusterStor E1000 storage system, which is specifically aimed at supercomputing environments.

LUMI is expected to come online by mid-2021. It’s being commissioned from HP by the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking, a European Union initiative that seeks to enhance the supercomputing infrastructure in the region. 

Anders Dam Jensen, the initiative’s director, said the system “will support European researchers, industry and public sector, in better understanding and responding to complex challenges and transforming them into innovation opportunities.”

The LUMI contract follows two other recent high-performance computing wins for HPE. In the past week, the company won a deal to build the Czech Republic’s most powerful supercomputer and was commissioned by the Australian government to develop a 50-petaflop system to support research initiatives in areas such as astronomy.

The contracts show HPE is already seeing returns from its $1.3 billion acquisition of venerable supercomputer maker Cray last year. The products it obtained through the acquisition, which include the Cray EX supercomputing design on which LUMI will be based, now form a core part of the company’s high-performance computing portfolio.

Other major data center suppliers are also expanding their efforts in this segment. Nvidia Corp. introduced hardware modules called SuperPods this month that, according to the chipmaker, can be used to assemble a multi-petaflop supercomputer in a matter of weeks. A few days later, Nvidia announced it had won a contract from the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking to build four new supercomputers. 

Photo: HPE