As part of a pan-European initiative, one of three leadership-class supercomputers, LUMI, will be located at CSC’s data center in Kajaani, Finland, and will run on 100% fossil-free hydropower from Vattenfall.

LUMI is one of the fastest supercomputers in the world, according to a press release, and will be operational between 2021 and 2026. The theoretical peak performance of LUMI will be over 200 petaflops (2*1017 floating point operations per second). This, like the performance of applications on LUMI, is about 10 times faster than with the Piz Daint supercomputer, which is the fastest in Europe at the moment.

“Supercomputers consume a lot of electricity, so the use of hydro power is important to reach climate goals. Besides the advantage of renewable energy we have excess heat from cooling water, thanks to which waste heat can be utilized in Kajaani’s district heating network. This reduces both costs and the carbon footprint. LUMI will be one of the world’s fastest supercomputers and will serve European research and innovation activities, strengthening the competitiveness of Europe and increasing its scientific potential”, says CSC’s Managing Director Kimmo Koski.

CSC is a Finnish center of expertise in information technology owned by the Finnish state and higher education institutions. In all service development and production, CSC strives to implement Finland’s goal of being carbon-neutral in 2035 and to promote implementation of the European Green Growth Program. As of Jan. 1, 2021, Vattenfall will deliver a yearly volume of up to 100 GWh of guarantee of origin-certified hydropower to CSC´s data center.

“Vattenfall wants to enable a fossil-free living in one generation. To win this electricity supply agreement shows that we have a product and solutions that well matches the needs of our customers in Finland. CSC has high ambitions to be fossil free and new digital solutions and technology can in a smart way be used to enable that. I will personally also follow the exiting development of the supercomputer”, says Magnus Westberg, head of production clients at Vattenfall Business Sales.

Vattenfall has operations in Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, the UK and Finland. The company produces heat and electricity from six energy sources: wind, hydro, biomass, nuclear, coal and gas. Vattenfall owns and operates more than 100 hydro plants, and hydropower accounts for about 20% of the company’s total electricity generation.

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