LUMI’s capacity in high demand: to be succeeded by an AI-optimized supercomputer
The new Top500 list of the fastest supercomputers was released today at the ISC25 conference in Hamburg, Germany. LUMI, EuroHPC Joint Undertaking’s flagship supercomputer operated by the LUMI consortium, positioned 9th on the Top500 reaching a measured High-Performance Linpack (HPL) performance of 379.7 petaflops on this biannual list. Over 3,000 scientific projects have been running on LUMI, and over half of LUMI’s computing resources have been utilized for AI-related research and innovation.
The system is robust and operating under high demand: so far, nearly 7,000 users across Europe have used 140 million GPU-hours and over 3,800 million CPU-core-hours on LUMI. The system’s GPU resources have been in consistently high demand over the years, with usage steadily increasing due to the rise of AI and its reliance on GPU-intensive workloads.
LUMI-AI: new frontier for AI-optimised supercomputing
To meet the needs of the AI era, the LUMI system will be followed by a new AI-focused supercomputer called LUMI-AI. The procurement process for the LUMI-AI system has just started. This system will leverage a large, accelerated partition utilising next-generation GPUs. This supercomputer is part of the LUMI AI Factory, one of the European Union’s first AI Factories. The LUMI AI Factory has already started its operations utilizing the existing LUMI supercomputer.
“The upcoming exascale LUMI-AI supercomputer and quantum computer LUMI-IQ will form the most advanced public quantum-accelerated HPC+AI research infrastructure in the world. As part of the LUMI AI Factory, these unforeseen tools for RDI and research pave the way for completely new AI innovations and research horizons. European Union’s AI Factories are a major investment from the EU and the consortium countries securing Europe’s position at the forefront of HPC and AI development for the long term,” says Kimmo Koski, Managing Director of CSC.
The LUMI AI Factory has a broad support and commitment from a consortium including Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Norway, and Poland. The LUMI AI Factory will be hosted at CSC – IT Center for Science.
RDI booster across industry sectors
Dozens of companies across Europe have already utilised LUMI, and many of them have deployed AI in their RDI processes.
For example, Finnish health technology company Gosta Labs is using LUMI to develop machine learning models that improve patient care and medical practice through its flagship product – an AI assistant featuring language models tailored to the social and healthcare sector, automating the creation of client and patient records.
“Being part of the Finnish and EU AI ecosystem is built into our DNA. It’s really great to be able to develop our models with LUMI. Promoting European technological and AI expertise is also a very important mission for us at Gosta Labs,” says Lauri Sippola, CEO & co-founder of Gosta Labs.
This is an example of an RDI project enabled by LUMI’s computing power. The LUMI AI Factory will further elevate opportunities for companies and academic researchers to a whole new level. The LUMI AI Factory will be a pioneering AI solution that seamlessly integrates world-class computing power, high-value data, and top-tier AI talent. It will serve as the state-of-the-art expert support center and AI hub offering European companies and researchers a comprehensive innovation environment offering unmatched support for AI-driven projects. The services will be free of charge for startups, SMEs, and academic researchers.
One of the leading AI platforms for science
In addition to the Top500 list, several other new benchmark lists were published at ISC25.
LUMI was listed in the HPL-MxP benchmark as number 5 with its 2.350 exaflops performance. The HPL-MxP benchmark probes the system capability for converged high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) workloads, which was one of the design goals of LUMI.
On the latest HPCG list (High-Performance Conjugate Gradient) LUMI was ranked number 5, with a result of 4.587 pflop/s. The HPCG benchmark provides an alternative metric for assessing supercomputer performance from the memory-bandwidth bound applications point of view and is meant to complement the HPL measurement.
The LUMI supercomputer is supplied by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), based on an HPE Cray EX supercomputer. The supercomputer is owned by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking and hosted by the LUMI consortium, including eleven European countries.
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