Ten countries club together for one supercomputer
On 13 June 2022 LUMI was inaugurated in Kajaani, Finland, a EuroHPC machine on the Cray EX platform from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, capable by the release's own words of more than 375 petaflops. Its budget of EUR 144.5 million was found jointly by the EU joint undertaking and a consortium of ten states. At that moment it was the fastest machine in Europe and the third fastest in the world.
Why it matters
None of the ten consortium countries would have built such a machine alone, and that is the whole design: compute here is not a state's property but a shared quota a researcher reaches through an open call. Half the machine time went exactly there. Later European open language models were trained on this machine and its neighbours.
The consortium is Finland, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Iceland, Norway, Poland, Sweden and Switzerland; the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking owns the machine and the CSC centre hosts it. Half the computing time is allocated to EuroHPC users through periodic open peer-reviewed calls. The machine runs only on renewable energy, is cooled naturally, and its waste heat supplies up to a fifth of local district heating. In the November 2022 TOP500 list LUMI held 2,220,288 cores, 309.10 petaflops on Linpack against a peak of 428.70, and drew 6,016 kilowatts. What the record does not claim. On 13 June the machine was not yet generally available: a second pilot phase began in August and general availability came in late September 2022. The fifth of capacity aimed at companies comes from a quote by CSC's managing director on the same page rather than from a formally fixed quota, and is presented that way here.