The first Danish LUMI projects have been chosen

Before long LUMI in Finland will be online and open for the first pilot projects. To prepare both the scientists, support personnel, administration in different countries and the staff at LUMI, the supercomputer will commence with pilot projects, where everyone can learn to work the giant HPC before LUMI is expected to open for further calls later in 2021.

Four Danish projects have been chosen to be the first from Denmark to grapple with the new pre-exascale supercomputer in Finland. Two projects will run on the CPU section and two projects will run on the GPU section of the HPC as part of the pilot stage. 

"Our hope is that these four projects will gain extremely important information for the whole research community in Denmark. So that we can tell other researchers what it takes to use a supercomputer like LUMI. Which traps to avoid, what is required of your code and just overall good practises," says Eske Christiansen Head of HPC in DeiC, which is coordinating the Danish participation in LUMI.

Projects at both LUMI-C and LUMI-G

The two projects that will run first will be the “High Performance Computing Quantum Chemistry” and “Perfect Antennas for Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (PARIS)” since they will be using the CPU section also called LUMI-C. This is the part of LUMI that consist of a more classical CPU HPC setup, and will be operational first. Meaning these projects’ code will only use CPUs to do calculations, but they need high-speed/low-latency networks between the individual computers and CPUs.

Later in the year the two other projects “BIG-MAP: Battery Interface Genome – Materials Acceleration Platform” and “Stjernedannelse” will run on the GPU section called LUMI-G. It is this part of the LUMI supercomputer that really marks a difference in the amount of calculations. This section of the HPC facility requires both code and knowledge to be utilized in the best possible way.

"With LUMI we get a platform where Danish researchers are able to run their research on a piece of world-class infrastructure, that will give opportunities not provided at any Danish facilities," says Eske Christiansen from DeiC.

Support from LUST personnel

All four projects will be supported by the Danish LUMI user support called LUMI LUST, both for access but also to a great extent to help optimize their code in relation to the facility. Thereby the Danish LUST personnel also receive training in service of the researchers and their use of the facility.

Selection of the four projects

Since the formal and legal application process for resources is not in place yet, the projects have not been selected via ordinary project calls. Instead the pilot projects were chosen through an assessment of the Danish HPC landscape and parameters such as the researchers' experience with the use of HPC, their willingness to share their experience with the pilots nationally, diverse research areas and political priorities such as green transition.

The choice of the Danish pilot projects is also largely driven by the desire to create as many positive results as possible for Danish research, as well as provide a big competence boost throughout the whole Danish research community in regards to using facilities of the LUMI size. Furthermore the projects all have a high societal relevance as they deal in points of interest such as the environment, climate and the green transition.

LUMI is expected to open for general calls later in 2021.