Today, at a dedicated event, the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking will inaugurate its latest supercomputer: LUMI, located in Kajaani, Finland. LUMI is the fastest and most energy-efficient supercomputer in Europe, ranked also the third fastest in the world. It is a joint endeavour of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking and a consortium of ten European countries: Finland, Belgium, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Iceland, Norway, Poland, Sweden, and Switzerland.
Executive Vice-President for a Europe fit for the Digital Age Margrethe Vestager said:
“Today marks a major step for Europe’s digital and green transformation. Lumi is now the fastest and most energy-efficient supercomputer in Europe, and one of the most powerful ones in the world. Thanks to its massive computing capacity, Lumi will enable scientific breakthroughs in for instance medicine and climate research at a much faster pace. It could be in the development of vaccines, diagnosis of cancer, or mitigation of the effects of climate change. This is a great example of the enormous potential of artificial intelligence to improve our lives.”
LUMI is the first of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking’s pre-exascale supercomputers to be launched. It will have an expected peak performance of 550 petaflops (550 million billion calculations per second) while being fully powered by renewable energy: LUMI uses natural cooling systems and its waste heat will account for about 20 percent of the district heating in the city of Kajaani, substantially reducing the entire city’s annual carbon footprint. LUMI will be generally accessible to European users in September 2022 and will contribute to accelerating the creation of new knowledge and solutions to global societal challenges.
Its computing power will complement the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking’s existing supercomputers: Discoverer in Bulgaria, MeluXina in Luxembourg, Vega in Slovenia, and Karolina in Czechia. Three more EuroHPC supercomputers are underway: LEONARDO in Italy, Deucalion in Portugal, and MareNostrum 5 in Spain. The inauguration of LUMI will take place this afternoon in Kajaani, Finland, and will be streamed online. A press conference will take place at 12:45 (Brussels time), followed by the inauguration ceremony at 14:00 (Brussels time).
More information will be available in this EuroHPC press release right after the inauguration event.