The recently completed supercomputer Olivia is Norway’s most powerful and sustainable supercomputer.
Olivia is the most powerful supercomputer in Norway, built by HPE and equipped with AMD CPUs and Nvidia superchips. The country’s computing capacity has increased sixteenfold after completion, writes The Register. Olivia even provides fresh fish.
AMD & Nvidia combination
Olivia combines 504 AMD CPUs with 304 Nvidia Grace Hopper chips. The Grace Hopper superchips contain a powerful CPU and GPU in a single housing and are used for scientific calculations and AI workloads. The GPU partition landed in 134th place among the most powerful supercomputers worldwide thanks to 13.2 petaFLOPS.
Widespread Use
Thanks to the combination of CPU and GPU clusters, Olivia can handle different types of tasks. These range from climate research and hydraulic engineering studies to marine biology, health sciences and language technology. The machine will be available to researchers throughout Norway, not just those from Sigma2.
Warm water for salmon farms
Olivia is not only more powerful, but also more sustainable than its predecessor Betzy. The system consumes 30 percent less power, thanks in part to the energy-efficient hardware and the cooling system of the Lefdal data center. Sigma2 wants to use the residual heat from the supercomputer in the future to heat water for salmon farms. In this way, the data centers contribute to a circular economy.