The procurement contract of Vega, a new petascale EuroHPC supercomputer has been signed by the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU), the Institute of Information Science in Maribor, Slovenia (IZUM), the hosting entity, and the company Atos, the selected vendor.
Vega, named after a Slovenian mathematician Jurij Vega, will be a petascale supercomputer, capable of executing more than 6,8 Petaflops or 6,8 million billion calculations per second. With such performance, the system will be amongst the world's top 50 supercomputers.
Mr. Anders Dam Jensen, the EuroHPC Executive Director stated:
"Thanks to this signature, the Vega supercomputer will increase the computing power available in Slovenia and in Europe as a whole by early next year. It will support European researchers and users from the public and industry sector, wherever they are in Europe. Vega will drive innovation and help Europe compete globally in strategic domains including artificial intelligence, high performance data analytics (HPDA), personalised medicine, bio-engineering, fight against climate change, or drug and material design."
Dr. Aleš Bošnjak, Director of IZUM added:
“ With this new supercomputer, we will be able to fulfil our HPC RIVR (Computing Infrastructure of the Eastern Region) project design goals and ensure that a new generation of experts and developers, as well as the wider Slovenian community, can meet new challenges within our national consortium SLING (Slovenian National Supercomputing Network) and further contribute to the regional and European HPC initiatives.”
Vega is co-funded by IZUM and the EuroHPC JU with a joint investment of EUR 17.2 million and will be jointly operated by the two entities. This new supercomputing system is expected to be operational in March 2021.
Its objective is to foster open science and enhance research and innovation in Europe by providing access to leading edge HPC infrastructures and services to a wide range of users from the scientific community as well as the industry and the public sector. This new supercomputer will support the development of leading scientific, public sector and industrial applications in many domains, specifically including machine learning, artificial intelligence and high performance data analytics (HPDA).
Background
The company Atos has been selected following a call for tender launched in April 2020.
The computing power of Vega will soon be complemented by four additional EuroHPC petascale supercomputers to be built in the following supercomputing centres:
- LuxProvide, Luxembourg
- Sofiatech, Bulgaria
- IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Centre, Czech Republic
- Minho Advanced Computing Centre (MACC), Portugal,
and, once all the procurement processes are completed, three EuroHPC pre-exascale supercomputers located at the following supercomputing centres:
- Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, Spain
- CSC – IT Center for Science, Finland
- CINECA, Italy.
More information
- Press release from IZUM
- Technical specifications of the new system in this dedicated section of our website.
Details
- Publication date
- 1 October 2020
- Author
- European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking