The AGH University of Science and Technology has inaugurated its Athena supercomputer. Athena, installed last year, delivers nearly 8 peak petaflops of computing power. The system is intended to serve general research purposes and to help generate papers, patents and “solutions for the innovative economy.” Athena is now the fastest supercomputer in Poland.
Athena, built by Polish IT firm Format, consists of 48 FormatServer THOR ERG21 servers, each with dual AMD Epyc “Rome” CPUs and 1TB of RAM. The bulk of the system’s power, however, comes from 384 Nvidia A100 (40GB) GPUs. The system is networked with Nvidia HDR InfiniBand 200Gb/s and is complemented by a high-speed disk subsystem. All told: 7.71 peak petaflops, or 5.05 Linpack petaflops, which placed Athena 105th on the most recent Top500 list. At 29.93 gigaflops per watt, Athena also scored an impressive ninth place on the Green500 list.
Athena was installed in 2021 at a datacenter run by Cyfronet, the academic computer center that operates under the umbrella of AGH University of Science and Technology. Cyfronet also operates the (similarly mythologically themed) Ares and Prometheus supercomputers, which respectively deliver 2.34 Linpack petaflops and 1.67 Linpack petaflops.
“Athena’s architecture is intended primarily for artificial intelligence calculations as well as medical applications, including the eradication of the Covid-19 pandemic,” said Kazimierz Wiatr, director of Cyfronet, in April.
“[Athena’s] computational resources offer completely new possibilities in the field of conducted research,” commented Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki (in translation) on the occasion of this month’s inauguration, which coincided with the launch of the new academic year at the university. “By increasing the possibilities of data processing, they allow for more efficient creation of advanced simulations and analyzes as well as the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning methods in transmissions from many fields. This opens up for you not only new scientific perspectives, but also the possibility of creating innovative solutions, which, I am convinced, may find innovative applications in our everyday life and economy in the near future. It is hard to imagine a more optimistic and inspiring opening of the new academic year than this.”
Cyfronet also previously operated the Zeus system — not to be confused with the recently announced exascale Jupiter system being built under the auspices of EuroHPC. Along similar lines, while Athena is not a EuroHPC system, EuroHPC recently announced that Cyfronet will host one of its new “mid-range supercomputers with petascale or pre-exascale capabilities” — that system will be called EHPCPL. Cyfronet also scored a quantum win from EuroHPC last week.