ECMWF Opens Bologna Datacenter in Preparation for Atos Supercomputer

By Oliver Peckham

September 14, 2021

In January 2020, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) – a juggernaut in the weather forecasting scene – signed a four-year, $89-million contract with European tech firm Atos to quintuple its supercomputing capacity. With the deal approaching the two-year mark, ECMWF has announced that the datacenter that will host the center’s new supercomputers has opened in Bologna. This new facility, along with new ECMWF offices in Bonn, also marks the ECMWF’s expansion from its sole site in the UK into a multi-site organization with international presence.

The new Atos system. Image courtesy of ECMWF.

Through the 2020 deal with Atos, the ECMWF is acquiring a BullSequana XH2000-based supercomputer with components from AMD, Mellanox and DDN. The system is divided into four “self-sufficient … clusters,” all of which are connected to high-performance storage. Each cluster has 1,872 compute nodes and 112 general purpose nodes spread across 22 racks (predominantly water-cooled). Each node has two AMD Epyc 7742 (64-core, Rome) processors and either 256GB of memory (compute nodes) or 512GB (general purpose nodes), for a total of over two petabytes of memory.

The high-performance storage system will contribute 700 terabytes of flash storage and 5.4 petabytes of hard disk storage for time-critical operations, as well as 13 petabytes of storage for research applications. Later, it will be joined by the ECMWF’s Data Handling System (DHS), which will be transported from Reading, UK to Bologna around the front half of 2022.

This supercomputer will be housed in the newly opened datacenter, which took over two years of construction to complete and is sited on a repurposed tobacco factory that has now become the Tecnopolo di Bologna campus. The ECMWF said that while the pandemic has hindered some of its personnel transfers, other ECMWF staff are already working in the datacenter – with more to come. The same campus will also eventually play host to EuroHPC’s Leonardo supercomputer, if all goes according to plan.

ECMWF said in its new announcement that the system “will increase sustained performance by a factor of about five” compared to its current HPC capabilities. Its existing systems were procured through a 2016 deal with Cray, which upgraded and expanded a pair of Cray systems initially acquired in 2013, delivering around 8.5 peak petaflops via a pair of XC40s. Those XC40s will continue to host the ECMWF’s operational service calculations until May 2022, when the Atos system will take over those operations for a period of four years.

Initially, the system was expected to become operational this year following installation in 2020. However, understandably, the ECMWF appears to be running a bit behind schedule: the system was installed in summer of this year and Atos is now targeting a mid-2022 start to operations for the system. Atos said that the system is “now undergoing a series of user acceptance, operational and reliability tests[.]”

The new supercomputer capacity will enable a number of important changes for the ECMWF’s operations, including crucial progress towards its goal of improving the horizontal resolution of its forecast from 18km to 10km and increasing the number of vertical resolution layers from 91 to 137. The ECMWF also has an ambitious goal of a 5km ensemble forecast set for 2025.

When was the contract was announced, Florence Rabier, ECMWF’s Director General, said that thanks to the new technology, “we will now be able to run higher resolution forecasts in under an hour, meaning better information will be shared with our Member States even faster to enable much improved weather forecasts as they combine this enhanced information with their own data and predictions. As governments and society continue to grapple with the impacts of increasingly severe weather, we are also proud to be relying on a supercomputer designed to maximise energy efficiency.”

The announcement of the datacenter’s opening was accompanied by another announcement: the opening of the ECMWF’s offices in Bonn, Germany.

“It is an important moment in the life of ECMWF as we formally become a multi-site organisation, with our head offices in the UK, our new data centre in Bologna, Italy, and our new offices in Bonn, Germany,” Rabier said. “As an intergovernmental organisation, ECMWF’s dedication and loyalty are to its Member States. Over the years, however, ECMWF has also developed a close and extremely constructive working partnership with the European Union. When you consider that most of ECMWF’s Member States are also members of the EU, this partnership makes considerable sense. It allows EU and ECMWF Member States to be efficient by avoiding duplication of efforts and spending in areas of work where synergies are paramount.”

Header image: the new ECMWF datacenter. Image courtesy of ECMWF.

Subscribe to HPCwire's Weekly Update!

Be the most informed person in the room! Stay ahead of the tech trends with industry updates delivered to you every week!

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion XL — were added to the benchmark suite as MLPerf continues Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing power it brings to artificial intelligence.  Nvidia's DGX Read more…

Call for Participation in Workshop on Potential NSF CISE Quantum Initiative

March 26, 2024

Editor’s Note: Next month there will be a workshop to discuss what a quantum initiative led by NSF’s Computer, Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate could entail. The details are posted below in a Ca Read more…

Waseda U. Researchers Reports New Quantum Algorithm for Speeding Optimization

March 25, 2024

Optimization problems cover a wide range of applications and are often cited as good candidates for quantum computing. However, the execution time for constrained combinatorial optimization applications on quantum device Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at the network layer threatens to make bigger and brawnier pro Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HBM3E memory as well as the the ability to train 1 trillion pa Read more…

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing po Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HB Read more…

Nvidia Looks to Accelerate GenAI Adoption with NIM

March 19, 2024

Today at the GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia launched a new offering aimed at helping customers quickly deploy their generative AI applications in a secure, s Read more…

The Generative AI Future Is Now, Nvidia’s Huang Says

March 19, 2024

We are in the early days of a transformative shift in how business gets done thanks to the advent of generative AI, according to Nvidia CEO and cofounder Jensen Read more…

Nvidia’s New Blackwell GPU Can Train AI Models with Trillions of Parameters

March 18, 2024

Nvidia's latest and fastest GPU, codenamed Blackwell, is here and will underpin the company's AI plans this year. The chip offers performance improvements from Read more…

Nvidia Showcases Quantum Cloud, Expanding Quantum Portfolio at GTC24

March 18, 2024

Nvidia’s barrage of quantum news at GTC24 this week includes new products, signature collaborations, and a new Nvidia Quantum Cloud for quantum developers. Wh Read more…

Alibaba Shuts Down its Quantum Computing Effort

November 30, 2023

In case you missed it, China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba has shut down its quantum computing research effort. It’s not entirely clear what drove the change. Read more…

Nvidia H100: Are 550,000 GPUs Enough for This Year?

August 17, 2023

The GPU Squeeze continues to place a premium on Nvidia H100 GPUs. In a recent Financial Times article, Nvidia reports that it expects to ship 550,000 of its lat Read more…

Shutterstock 1285747942

AMD’s Horsepower-packed MI300X GPU Beats Nvidia’s Upcoming H200

December 7, 2023

AMD and Nvidia are locked in an AI performance battle – much like the gaming GPU performance clash the companies have waged for decades. AMD has claimed it Read more…

DoD Takes a Long View of Quantum Computing

December 19, 2023

Given the large sums tied to expensive weapon systems – think $100-million-plus per F-35 fighter – it’s easy to forget the U.S. Department of Defense is a Read more…

Synopsys Eats Ansys: Does HPC Get Indigestion?

February 8, 2024

Recently, it was announced that Synopsys is buying HPC tool developer Ansys. Started in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1970 as Swanson Analysis Systems, Inc. (SASI) by John Swanson (and eventually renamed), Ansys serves the CAE (Computer Aided Engineering)/multiphysics engineering simulation market. Read more…

Choosing the Right GPU for LLM Inference and Training

December 11, 2023

Accelerating the training and inference processes of deep learning models is crucial for unleashing their true potential and NVIDIA GPUs have emerged as a game- Read more…

Intel’s Server and PC Chip Development Will Blur After 2025

January 15, 2024

Intel's dealing with much more than chip rivals breathing down its neck; it is simultaneously integrating a bevy of new technologies such as chiplets, artificia Read more…

Baidu Exits Quantum, Closely Following Alibaba’s Earlier Move

January 5, 2024

Reuters reported this week that Baidu, China’s giant e-commerce and services provider, is exiting the quantum computing development arena. Reuters reported � Read more…

Leading Solution Providers

Contributors

Comparing NVIDIA A100 and NVIDIA L40S: Which GPU is Ideal for AI and Graphics-Intensive Workloads?

October 30, 2023

With long lead times for the NVIDIA H100 and A100 GPUs, many organizations are looking at the new NVIDIA L40S GPU, which it’s a new GPU optimized for AI and g Read more…

Shutterstock 1179408610

Google Addresses the Mysteries of Its Hypercomputer 

December 28, 2023

When Google launched its Hypercomputer earlier this month (December 2023), the first reaction was, "Say what?" It turns out that the Hypercomputer is Google's t Read more…

AMD MI3000A

How AMD May Get Across the CUDA Moat

October 5, 2023

When discussing GenAI, the term "GPU" almost always enters the conversation and the topic often moves toward performance and access. Interestingly, the word "GPU" is assumed to mean "Nvidia" products. (As an aside, the popular Nvidia hardware used in GenAI are not technically... Read more…

Shutterstock 1606064203

Meta’s Zuckerberg Puts Its AI Future in the Hands of 600,000 GPUs

January 25, 2024

In under two minutes, Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, laid out the company's AI plans, which included a plan to build an artificial intelligence system with the eq Read more…

Google Introduces ‘Hypercomputer’ to Its AI Infrastructure

December 11, 2023

Google ran out of monikers to describe its new AI system released on December 7. Supercomputer perhaps wasn't an apt description, so it settled on Hypercomputer Read more…

China Is All In on a RISC-V Future

January 8, 2024

The state of RISC-V in China was discussed in a recent report released by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The report, entitled "E Read more…

Intel Won’t Have a Xeon Max Chip with New Emerald Rapids CPU

December 14, 2023

As expected, Intel officially announced its 5th generation Xeon server chips codenamed Emerald Rapids at an event in New York City, where the focus was really o Read more…

IBM Quantum Summit: Two New QPUs, Upgraded Qiskit, 10-year Roadmap and More

December 4, 2023

IBM kicks off its annual Quantum Summit today and will announce a broad range of advances including its much-anticipated 1121-qubit Condor QPU, a smaller 133-qu Read more…

  • arrow
  • Click Here for More Headlines
  • arrow
HPCwire