The Hunter supercomputer is operational in Germany. The system was built by HPE with AMD Instinct MI300 APUs and uses direct liquid cooling.
In Germany, the High-Performance Computing Center of the University of Stuttgart (HLRS) is celebrating that its newest supercomputer is operational. Called Hunter, the system is good for a peak computing power of 48.1 Petaflops. That’s basically enough for a spot in the top 50 of the list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers when the Top 500 publishes its next official ranking.
Hunter was built by HPE based on the HPE Cray EX4000 architecture. That architecture also forms the basis of the three existing exascale supercomputers in the world today. The HPC system consists of 136 nodes connected via HPE’s Slingshot interconnect.
Instinct APUs and liquid cooling.
For computing power, HPE and HLRS are turning to the AMD Instinct MI300A APU. The Instinct MI300A is an AI chip equipped with 228 compute units built on the CDNA 3 architecture for accelerating workloads, coupled with 24 Zen 4 cores and 128 GB of HBM3 memory, all on the same chip. The APU is AMD’s answer to Nvidia’s Grace-Hopper superchip.
Cooling of the system is no longer done with air. Hunter is fully equipped with direct liquid cooling. That should keep the supercomputer fresher and use less energy.
Hunter’s architecture makes the system very suitable for AI training. AI start-up Seedbox.ai has already deployed the system during its testing phase to train LLMs in 24 European languages. Those models will be made available under an open source license.
Hunter is to support further AI ambitions within the EU under the banner of the HammerHAI project. That project is part of the plans of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, and should boost European use of AI.
Hunter’s activation is part of the EU’s ambition to become more independent of foreign countries in terms of HPC computing power. Supercomputers have strategic relevance, and Europe wants to build sufficient capacity on its own territory. Other systems that saw the light of day under European impetus are Eni in Italy and Lumi in Finland, in which Belgium participated.
On to exascale
Despite Hunter’s solid performance, the HPC system is just a stepping stone. In 2027, the HLRS wom join forces with HPE to activate a new system called Herder. Herder will have a similar architecture, but should have computing power of hundreds of Petaflops. Herder was even described as an exascale system when it was announced, although it is not clear whether Herder will actually exceed the Exaflops limit. The first European exascale computer is likely to be Jupiter, built by Eviden around SiPearl Rhea processors developed in Europe.