ESA unveils SpaceHPC in Italy. It’s a supercomputer with a computing power of five petaflops, designed for research and simulations related to space.
The European Space Agency ESA unveils its own supercomputer SpaceHPC in Italy. This system consists of 34,000 x86 cores from both AMD and Intel, combined with 108 Nvidia H100 GPUs that together possess 9,480 GB of graphics memory. The storage capacity is 3.5 PB, connected at a speed of 500 GB/s. SpaceHPC has 156 TB of RAM and is glued together with a dual Infiniband network.
Direct Liquid Cooling
These specifications are good for a computing power of 5 petaFLOPS. This earns the system a modest place in the Top 500 of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. In a new ranking, SpaceHPC would be around position 210.
ESA opted for direct liquid cooling. With this, SpaceHPC achieves a power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.09. This means that for every kilowatt of computing power, only 0.09 kilowatts are needed for cooling. By today’s standards, that’s a high efficiency. A low PUE is important for new HPC systems, as the powerful hardware consumes a lot of electricity. Without a low PUE, consumption would completely spiral out of control.
With SpaceHPC, ESA focuses on the supporting ecosystem of space travel in Europe. Researchers and scientists can use the system, but also SMEs, start-ups, innovators, and developers.
Weather Forecasts
SpaceHPC has already completed its first task. As a test, the system simulated space weather. The supercomputer can be used to analyze solar activity, which is important for predicting potential disruptions and dangers to satellites.
Although SpaceHPC was officially opened this week, the testing phase of the supercomputer will continue at least until the end of April. After that, other parties will be able to reserve computing time.