Hewlett-Packard will build the world's fastest computer

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) will build a computer in Finland with over 550 petaflops of theoretical maximum performance, making it one of the fastest in the world.

The European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) has granted HPE funding of over $160 million (about ?135 million) for the project.

The supercomputer, to be called LUMI and based in Finland, aims to help European researchers and both public and private organisations to make significant progress in R&D and to boost innovation in areas such as health, weather forecasting and AI-enabled products.

LUMI will feature HPE Cray EX supercomputers with AMD EPYC next-generation CPUs and AMD Instinct GPUs. And it will have a theoretical maximum performance of more than 550 petaflops, equivalent to the performance of approximately 1.5 million notebooks, the company said in a statement. It will be one of the world's fastest "pre-scaled" supercomputers.

The supercomputer will have sophisticated direct liquid cooling capabilities due to its location, which will increase the overall efficiency of the electricity and water usage used to operate the system. It will also allow the use of waste heat in Kajaani's district heating system.

LUMI will be based in the Finnish city of Kajaani and the countries that have agreed on its use include Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Poland, Sweden and Switzerland.

The supercomputer is expected to be available from mid-2021 and once operational, it will be one of the "most competitive and greenest supercomputers in the world", said EuroHPC JU's Executive Director, Anders Dam Jensen.

Currently, the world's most powerful supercomputer is the Fugaku, which is located in Japan and has 415.53 petaflops, a unit equivalent to 1,000 billion floating point operations per second, and a theoretical maximum performance of over 1,000 petaflops (1 exaflop).

Fujitsu and the Japanese research institute Riken announced the creation of Fugaku last June and it is almost three times more powerful than the previous leader in the ranking, Summit.