Today CSC in Finland announced that its datacenter in Kajaani will host a pan-European high-performance supercomputer. The machine will be about ten times more powerful than the most powerful supercomputer currently in Europe. The decision was made by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, a high performance computing initiative supported by the European Union. This center will provide highly competitive HPC resources for Europe’s scientific, industrial and public users. In addition, it will provide a framework for Europe to strengthen its position as one of the pioneers of the data-driven economy.
EuroHPC continues the European collaboration on high-performance computing, from which European researchers have already benefited from over the years. The investment will make CSC’s datacenter one of the world’s largest players in the field of high-performance computing,” said Kimmo Koski, Managing Director, CSC.
The LUMI (Large Unified Modern Infrastructure) consortium was formed for the EuroHPC application process. The countries involved are Finland, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Norway, Poland, Sweden and Switzerland. Discussions with Estonia and the Netherlands about joining the consortium are taking place. The consortium provides a high-quality, cost-efficient and environmentally sustainable HPC ecosystem based on true European collaboration. The members also provide a high level of competence from computing and training to data management.
The supercomputing and data infrastructure at CSC’s datacenter in Kajaani will help position Europe as one of the world leaders in supercomputing, enabling European researchers to access world-class computing resources. Computing power is required in leading-edge research in a wide range of disciplines, such as climate, pharmaceutical and cancer research as well as artificial intelligence. The state-of-the-art computing resources will also lay grounds to carry out research in areas, which have previously been out of reach, increasing the possibilities for scientific breakthroughs with immense societal impact, such as understanding climate change. The new data management and HPC infrastructure will lay grounds for innovation and new data-based business opportunities in areas such as platform economy and the development of artificial intelligence.
CSC’s datacenter in Kajaani has an abundant supply of low-price and environmentally friendly hydropower. The benefits of the location also include warm water cooling, which enables waste heat to be utilized in the district heating network of Kajaani, further reducing costs and CO2 footprint. The CSC Kajaani datacenter is highly scalable for large hardware installations and extensions or other potential infrastructure, making it ideal for building a sustainable datacenter ecosystem. The reliable and fast data communications networks of the datacenter are also designed for HPC. In addition, the area has a unique focus on data analytics thanks to the Kajaani University of Applied Sciences and numerous ICT companies.
Technical details and timeline
| Name | LUMI (Large Unified Modern Infrastructure). Lumi means snow in Finnish. |
| Theoretical peak performance | Planned to be more than 200 petaflop/s with Linpack performance exceeding 150 petaflop/s. |
| Storage | Over 60 petabyte/s with a sizeable flash layer providing more than 1 terabyte/s of bandwidth. |
| Used technologies | The supercomputer achieves its high performance with a large number of nodes with accelerators (GPUs). In addition the system is complemented by a CPU only partition, IaaS cloud services and a large object storage solution. |
| Budget | The budget for the EuroHPC JU in 2019–2020 is approximately 1.4 billion Euros, which includes public investments from the EU and participating states as well as investments from private partners. The total budget of the EuroHPC pre-exascale system in CSC’s datacenter in Kajaani is 207.1 million Euros. |
| Timeline | Machine room construction: June 2019 – June 2020 System procurement: July 2019 – System installations: Q4/2020 Operations: Q4/2020–Q4/2026 |
