SAN JOSE, Calif., Feb. 26, 2021 — Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) today announced that it is building a new supercomputer for KTH Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, one of Sweden’s largest technical universities dedicated to science and engineering research. The new supercomputer, which is funded by Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC), will enable a significant level of computational performance, powered by the HPE Cray EX supercomputer, to improve modeling and simulation from complex data to make breakthroughs in academia and for a range of industrial areas, including drug design, renewable energy, and advanced automotive and fleet vehicles.

The new supercomputer, which KTH has named “Dardel” in honor of the Swedish novelist, Thora Dardel, and her first husband, Nils Dardel, the post-impressionist painter, will replace KTH’s current flagship system, Beskow, and will be housed on KTH’s main campus at the PDC Center for High Performance Computing.

SNIC’s new flagship system, Dardel, will be built using the HPE Cray EX supercomputer, which features an advanced high performance computing architecture designed for next-generation supercomputing, such as for exascale-class systems that are 10X faster than today’s most powerful supercomputers.

The HPE Cray EX supercomputer will include HPE Slingshot for purpose-built HPC networking to address demands for higher speed and congestion control for data-intensive workloads. It will also feature next generation AMD EPYC processors and AMD Instinct GPU accelerators to improve efficiency and achieve the performance required to process and harness insights from computationally complex data.

With a theoretical peak performance of 13.5 petaflops, Dardel will be significantly faster than the current flagship system at PDC. The advanced capabilities of the new system that HPE is delivering will help Swedish researchers tackle challenging research areas, including computational fluid dynamics, biophysics and quantum chemistry, that are used in R&D supporting Swedish companies across the manufacturing, automotive and transportation, medical, agriculture, oil and gas, aeronautical and space industries. Example companies using PDC’s HPC systems for R&D include trucking manufacturer Scania and several technical consulting companies such as Sweco, Tyréns and FSDynamics.

“High performance computing (HPC) technologies are broadly used in R&D to advance the technologies that go into the products and services we use each day. For decades, the PDC Center for High Performance Computing at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology has empowered a community of researchers to make breakthroughs across a range of industries using HPC,” said Peter Ungaro, senior vice president and general manager, HPC and Mission Critical Solutions at HPE. “We are honored to have been selected by the KTH Royal Institute of Technology to deliver the latest HPE Cray EX supercomputer with next-generation AMD technologies and provide an even greater level of performance to improve and expand Swedish academic research and drive innovation for Swedish industrial companies.”

HPE to deliver KTH’s Dardel in two phases

HPE will install the first phase of the supercomputer this summer. It will feature over 65,000 CPU cores and it be ready for research use in July 2021. The second phase of the installation will consist of GPUs which will be installed later this year and be ready for use in January 2022.

About Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is a global edge-to-cloud platform as-a-service company that helps organizations accelerate outcomes by unlocking value from all of their data, everywhere. Built on decades of reimagining the future and innovating to advance the way we live and work, HPE delivers unique, open and intelligent technology solutions, with a consistent experience across all clouds and edges, to help customers develop new business models, engage in new ways, and increase operational performance. For more information, visit: www.hpe.com.

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Source: HPE