Norway's most powerful supercomputer will use waste heat to raise salmon
HPE-built system mixes Nvidia's Grace-Hopper superchips with AMD Turin CPUs to maximize HPC potential
This week the Norwegian scientific community celebrated the completion of the Olivia supercomputer, which combines AMD CPUs with Nvidia Superchips to deliver a 16-fold boost to the nation's computing capacity – and eventually put fresh fish on the table.
Built by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) for Norway's national scientific computing division Sigma2, and located in an underground datacenter deep within the Lefdal Mines, Olivia combines 504 of AMD's latest Turin CPUs and 304 of Nvidia's Grace Hopper Superchips with 5.3 petabytes of HPE Lustre storage via HPE's 200 Gbps Slingshot 11 NICs
Nvidia's Grace Hopper may not be its latest accelerators, but they have proven to be among the most energy-efficient ever made. The parts combine Nvidia's 72-core Grace CPUs with a 144 GB H100 graphics accelerator. Each of these 1,000-watt chips is capable of delivering upwards of 67 teraFLOPS of FP64 matrix math for highly precise scientific workloads, or as much as 4 petaFLOPS of sparse FP8 for machine learning tasks.
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In this fall's Top500 ranking of the most powerful publicly known supers, Olivia's GPU partition took 134th place, delivering 13.2 petaFLOPS in the High-Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark.
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The combination of the Nvidia-based GPU partition and the AMD-based CPU section allows the machine to address a broader range of high-performance computing and AI workloads. While many scientific workloads benefit heavily from the highly parallel processing afforded by GPUs, not all do. The two partitions enable Olivia to address both possibilities.
Olivia is expected to support research into areas like renewable energy including hydro electric power, climate modeling, marine science, health, and language. Access to the machine won't be limited to the boffins at Sigma2 either, but will include researchers across the nation.
On top of being Norway's most powerful supercomputer to date, the system is also among its most sustainable, cutting power consumption by 30 percent compared to its predecessor Betzy. Eventually, Sigma2 aims to reuse waste heat generated by the liquid cooled Cray EX4000 compute blades to warm water for local salmon farms.
"Olivia marks a new chapter for Norwegian research. By combining cutting-edge performance with the unique energy efficiency of the Lefdal Mine Datacenter, we're not only accelerating scientific discovery, we're doing so responsibly," Helge Stranden, senior advisor for HPC and storage at Sigma2 said in a statement. ®