The Vega supercomputer is the largest supercomputer in Slovenia. Based on the BullSequana XH2000 technology infrastructure delivered by Atos, the petascale supercomputer with a sustained performance of 6.9 petaflops, or 6.9 million billion calculations per second will underpin open science, research, and innovations in Slovenia and Europe.

The Vega supercomputer was jointly procured by Slovenia and the EU with an investment of €17.2 million. It is financed at 65.8% by the European Union from the European Regional Development Fund and the Slovenian Ministry of Education, Science and Sport, and at 34.2% by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking.

Vega will enable Slovene and European scientists to cooperate in large international projects and support the development of applications in science, public sector, and industry, especially in the fields of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and high-performance data analytics.

Anders Dam Jensen, the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) Executive Director, said: “Vega is the first EuroHPC supercomputer to come online. We are starting to see the fruits of EuroHPC JU work and of Europe’s investments in our technological future. Despite the challenges caused by COVID-19, the Vega supercomputer is fully operational and will significantly increase computing power currently available in Europe. The EuroHPC JU will continue to invest in research and deployment of HPC infrastructures, technology and applications and ensure the development of a world-class HPC ecosystem in Europe, to strengthen Europe’s position in the global race towards exascale, post-exascale and quantum computing capabilities.”

From April 2021, access time will be allocated to European scientific, industrial and public sector users, matching their demanding application requirements, according to the principles stated in the EuroHPC JU Council Regulation and the JU’s Access Policy.

EuroHPC JU is now ready to accept the first applications to access Vega’s computing power.

Background 

The procurement contract of Vega was signed on 1 October 2020 by the EuroHPC JU, the Slovenian IZUM, the hosting entity. The company Atos was selected as vendor following a call for tender launched in April 2020. On 10 March 2021, the machine was delivered and started the benchmarking phase.

Four other petascale supercomputers have been procured under the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking:

• MeluXina, Luxembourg
• Discoverer, Bulgaria
• Karolina, Czech Republic
• Deucalion, Portugal

Furthermore, two EuroHPC pre-exascale supercomputers have been procured and will complement the petascale machines:

• LUMI, Finland
• LEONARDO, Italy

More information

• Technical specifications of the new system in this dedicated section of our website.
• Details on the Access opportunities available on dedicated PRACE website.

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Source: Republic of Slovenia, Ministry of Education, Science and Sport