EuroHPC Supercomputers Are Still Among the Fastest and Greenest

The latest editions of the TOP500 and Green500 lists were released today at the ISC High Performance 2023 conference in Hamburg, Germany.

The TOP500 list ranks the world’s most powerful supercomputers by their performance on the LINPACK Benchmark while the Green500 list ranks the top 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world by measuring their energy efficiency features. The TOP500 and the Green500 lists are compiled twice a year in June and November.

Anders Dam Jensen, the Executive Director of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, said, 

“LUMI and Leonardo continue to impress on both a European and global scale. I am delighted to see our pre-exascale systems continue to rank highly on the TOP500 list and all the EuroHPC supercomputers ranked among the world’s most powerful supercomputers.

These rankings are proof of our ability to deliver on our objective to place Europe in a leading position in HPC.” 

LUMI and Leonardo retain their top rankings

The two EuroHPC pre-exascale supercomputers, LUMI and Leonardo, made their debuts on the TOP500 last year, and both ranked in the top 4 most powerful supercomputers in the world. The latest edition of the Top500 list confirms once more their top rankings.

For the third time in a row, LUMI, located in Finland and hosted by CSC, has ranked as the fastest supercomputer in Europe and sits in 3^rd place globally.

With a measured High Performance Linpack (HPL) performance of 309,1 petaflops or 309,1 million billion calculations per second and based on an HPE Cray EX supercomputer supplied by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), LUMI is able to compute and process data faster than any other European machine. LUMI was made available for all users across Europe in its full capacity since December 2022, and its computing capacity has already been exploited in various research projects to advance science. LUMI is powering, for instance, two major projects:

• the Destination Earth initiative, currently developing a highly accurate digital model of the Earth to monitor effects of natural and human activity on our planet, anticipate extreme events and adapt policies to climate-related challenges;
• the BioDT project, currently developing digital twins to help protect and restore biodiversity.

Thanks to LUMI’s eco- efficient features, these power-intensive tasks can be done in an exceptionally sustainable way. LUMI is fully powered using carbon-free hydroelectric renewable energy, uses natural water-cooling systems to cool down its processors and all the waste heat it produces is re-used for local district heating in its home city of Kajaani. These features make it one of the greenest supercomputers in Europe and indeed the world, with its ranking at 7^th place on the Green 500 list of most energy efficient and green supercomputers.

For its second appearance on the TOP500 list, and with a HPL performance of 238,7 petaflops or 238,7 million billion calculations per second, Leonardo continues to sit in 4^th place of the world’s fastest supercomputers.

Hosted by CINECA at the Bologna Technopole in Italy, Leonardo will cover a wide range of computing tasks and user needs. Based on the BullSequana XH2000 solution supplied by Atos, this world-class machine is specifically well suited for high-intensity computing tasks such as data processing, High Performance Data Analytics (HPDA), Artificial Intelligence and machine learning.  Leonardo is a great asset for European research and industry to innovate and bring benefits to citizens in fields such as medicine, energy, and agriculture.

From now on, European users can request access to Leonardo Booster through the EuroHPC JU Benchmark and Development calls. The purpose of the EuroHPC JU Benchmark and Development Access calls is to support researchers and HPC application developers by giving them the opportunity to develop, test and optimise their applications prior to applying for an Extreme Scale and/or Regular Access. The next cut-off date for applications is 1^st June 2023, 11:00 CET.

A fleet of world-class green supercomputers

All operational EuroHPC petascale supercomputers,  MeluXina, Vega, Discoverer, and Karolina have also ranked in the top 170 fastest supercomputers in the world, according to the latest TOP500 ranking.

In the Green500 list, LUMI is the greenest EuroHPC supercomputer, sitting at 7^th place globally and 3^rd in Europe, followed by Leonardo, which has ranked 15^th greenest in the world and 8^th in Europe. Karolina and MeluXina are in the top 30 greenest supercomputers in the world, sitting at 24^th and 26^th place respectively.

All EuroHPC supercomputers are water-cooled for improved energy efficiency and much care has been taken to ensure that these extremely powerful machines can operate in as sustainable a way as possible.

These rankings are testimonies to the work that the EuroHPC JU is doing to achieve its mission of developing a world-class supercomputing infrastructure in Europe while promoting green and sustainable technologies.

Background

The EuroHPC JU is a legal and funding entity created in 2018 to enable the European Union and EuroHPC participating countries to coordinate their efforts and pool their resources with the objective of making Europe a world leader in supercomputing. The mission of the EuroHPC JU is:

• to develop, deploy, extend and maintain in the EU a federated, secure hyperconnected supercomputing, quantum computing, service and data infrastructure ecosystem;
• to support the development and uptake of demand-oriented and user-driven innovative and competitive supercomputing and quantum computing systems based on a supply chain that will ensure the availability of components, technologies and knowledge;
• to widen the use of that supercomputing and quantum computing infrastructure to a large number of public and private users.

To date the EuroHPC JU has already procured eight supercomputers, located across Europe: LUMI in Finland, LEONARDO in Italy, Vega in Slovenia, MeluXina in Luxembourg,  Discoverer in Bulgaria, Karolina  in the Czechia, MareNostrum5 in Spain, and Deucalion in Portugal. The construction of additional two supercomputers is underway JUPITER in Germany, the first European exascale supercomputer and Daedalus in Greece, with plans for more, including quantum computers.  

More Info: 

• LUMI ranked high on new top lists press release from LUMI