Page 44 - EE Times Europe Magazine – June 2024

SPECIAL REPORT: EUROPE’S SUPERCOMPUTERS

Lumi, Leonardo, MareNostrum:

Conversations with Execs

Running Three of the World’s

Top 10 Supercomputers

By Pat Brans

hanks in large part to EU funding, European supercomputers are
making a strong showing on the world stage. Three of the top 10
entries in the November edition of the TOP500 list of the world’s
T fastest supercomputers are located in EU member states. The first is
Lumi, based in Finland and taking fifth place in the November 2023 edition of
the TOP500. The second is Leonardo, which operates in Italy and takes sixth
place on the same list. And the third is MareNostrum, based in Spain and
appearing as the world’s eighth fastest computer on the TOP500.
Each of these three systems was financed through a combination of invest-
ments from national agencies and matching funds from the EuroHPC Joint
Undertaking, which began operating in November 2018. It’s interesting to
note that during that same month, only one supercomputer in an EU member
state made it to the Top 10. That was SuperMUC-NG, in Germany, which took
eighth place.
EE Times Europe spoke with leading executives in the organizations
running Lumi, Leonardo and MareNostrum. Each told us about the kinds of
applications their supercomputers run and how they have adapted to meet
the challenges of AI and other applications. We also spoke about future
architectures that will meet the growing requirements for faster processing of
IMAGE: SHUTTERSTOCK
ever-larger data sets while minimizing power consumption. ■