LUMI: Successful Swedish Pilot Projects

LUMI ( www.lumi-supercomputer.eu ), one of the EuroHPC ( eurohpc-ju.europa.eu ) pre-exascale supercomputers, is located at the CSC – IT Center for Science (CSC) data centre in Kajaani, Finland. The supercomputer is hosted by the LUMI (Large Unified Modern Infrastructure) consortium, which includes ten European countries: Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Poland, Sweden, and Switzerland. By bringing together their unique high-performance computing (HPC) expertise and experience, these countries will together provide added value for the whole of Europe in relation to HPC and the LUMI pre-exascale resource.

The LUMI system is being installed in two phases: the first part is based on central processing units (CPUs), and the second part of the system will feature graphical processing units (GPUs). The plan is for the CPU part of LUMI to be operational for EU users in the third quarter of 2021, while the GPU part of LUMI will be operational in the first quarter of 2022. However, before the system can be considered operational, it will need to pass an extended list of tests, and that is the case for both the CPU and GPU parts (or phases) of the system. For testing purposes, each LUMI consortium country has selected up to two projects for each phase. The selected pilot projects will be run on the relevant phase of the system to test that phase to its limits.

The call for the Swedish pilot projects was organised by the Swedish Research Council (VR) and the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC), and it was open to researchers in Swedish higher education and research institutions or in Swedish enterprises. In order that the pilot projects could be used to test the system thoroughly, the selected projects were required to have specific profiles. 

Pilot projects to run on phase one of the system needed to involve data-intensive computing, high-throughput computing, and high-performance data analytics (CPU-only) workloads to generate stress, especially on the storage systems.

For phase two, projects had to utilise highly scalable GPU applications to keep the GPU partition under full load and demonstrate its scalability.

In addition, VR and SNIC required that the completed projects would be able to demonstrate scientific significance, as well as having the potential to provide breakthroughs in the relevant research area, and have a positive impact on society.

Ten Swedish applications were received for these two-phased pilot calls. Out of those applications, four projects were selected to be run as pilots on LUMI, with two projects being run in each testing phase. The four pilots representing the Swedish part of the consortium are as follows.

• The baryon cycle in colliding galaxies, Prof. Oscar Agertz, Lund University
• Turbulence data generation on Boeing hump, Prof. Philipp Schlatter, KTH Royal Institute of Technology
• Next generation global climate models, Prof. Thorsten Mauritsen, Stockholm University
• Lipid modulation of ion channel gating - showcasing the GROMACS AMD GPU port, Prof. Erik Lindahl, KTH Royal Institute of Technology

For all four projects, the EuroCC National Competence Centre Sweden (ENCCS) has been assisting the principal investigators with the process. Additionally, ENCCS is committing substantial effort in three out of the four projects to support porting the necessary software to LUMI.

Researchers from academia or business/industry who are interested in applying to use LUMI after the pilot period can contact ENCCS for support with preparing applications (see enccs.se/proposal-support ).