Dear Cray User Group colleagues,
CSC IT Center for Science Ltd (CSC Finland) would like to invite you to CUG 2023 in Helsinki, Finland, May 7 – 11, 2023. Our theme for this meeting is Sustainable Exascale. This is a double reference to environmental sustainability in hosting energy-hungry exascale systems, as well as to sustained application performance, that is harnessing the exascale systems for real-world workloads.
CSC Finland has hosted Cray systems since 1989. Our most recent installation, EU’s flagship supercomputer LUMI, is an HPE Cray EX (Shasta) system with 375 Pflop/s Linpack performance. (’Lumi’ means ’snow’ in Finnish and Estonian languages.) What makes LUMI unique is its fully carbon-neutral operations: it is powered by 100% hydroelectric energy and its waste heat is being utilized in heating up 20% of the surrounding city (Kajaani, in Northern Finland). The total footprint was also reduced by a brownfield datacenter solution and minding supply chain sustainability in the acquisition of the system. We are eager to hear other initiatives in our community for improving energy efficiency and reducing the carbon footprint of HPC operations!
What comes to sustained application performance but related to the previous topic, LUMI will be the main computing platform in the first phases of European Commission’s massive research program ”Destination Earth”, which aims at building a digital twin of Earth, to act as a tool for scenario work and political decision making: with an interplay of high-resolution global climate models, Earth system models and related impact models we will be able to determine which actions against climate change are most cost-efficient and having the greatest impact. In addition, LUMI will of course be supporting a variety of workloads of other scientific disciplines.
We hope to see in CUG2023 an inspiring overview of largest supercomputers in action supporting scientific discovery. We look forward to seeing you in Helsinki, the capital of the happiest country in the world. Helsinki is a European pioneer in sustainable urban development. Sustainable solutions are not only environmentally friendly and energy-efficient, but they are also made of citizen wellbeing, equality and functional everyday life.
See you next year!
Pekka Manninen
Director, LUMI Leadership Computing Facility
