The heat of this supercomputer heats 20% of a city in Finland

The Finnish information technology center CSC inaugurated this Monday in the city of Kajaani (central Finland) the supercomputer LUMI, the third most powerful in the world with a performance of 151.9 petaflops per second (151.900 billion operations per second).

With a cost of 202 million eurosthe LUMI (Large Unified Modern Infrastructure) project is part of the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU), which has another seven supercomputers already installed or under construction in various European cities, including Barcelona.

LUMI is participated by a consortium made up of a dozen European countries (Finland, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Iceland, Norway, Poland, Sweden and Switzerland), which will be able to use their supercomputing capacity for their own research projects.

This consortium provided half of the financing for the construction of the LUMI supercomputer and the European Union, through EuroHPC JU, paid for the other half.

LUMI, manufactured by the American company Hewlett Packard, offers one of the world’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) platforms and It will be one of the main scientific tools available to European researchers and businesses.

According to those responsible for the project, 20% of the supercomputer’s capacity will be reserved for European industry and small businesses, with the aim of promoting innovation and business based on the massive use of data, such as artificial intelligence.

The rest will be dedicated to scientific research, in areas such as climate change, medicine, mathematics, engineering, cybersecurity and social sciences, among many others.

“Today marks an important step in Europe’s digital and ecological transformation. LUMI is now the fastest and most energy-efficient supercomputer in Europe, and one of the most powerful in the world,” European Commission (EC) Vice-President Margrethe Vestager said in a statement.

According to Vestager, LUMI’s enormous computing power will allow great scientific advances to be made at a higher rate and it will be key in the development of vaccines, the diagnosis of cancer or the mitigation of the effects of climate change, among other areas.

Currently, LUMI is the most powerful supercomputer in Europe and the third in the world, only surpassed by the American Frontier system (the only real exascale system, with 1.1 exaflops per second) and by the Japanese Fugaku (442 petaflops per second). ).

LUMI’s computing power, whose peak power can reach 550 petaflops per second, It is equivalent to that of 1.5 million modern laptops, which when stacked would form a tower 23 kilometers high.

LUMI is also one of the most environmentally sustainable supercomputers in the world, as it uses only hydroelectric power, has negative CO2 emissions, and its waste heat is used to heat 20% of the city of Kajaani.