Hewlett Packard Enterprise Launches Speed-Driven Supercomputer in Poland

Hewlett Packard Enterprise has built a new supercomputer for the Academic Computer Centre Cyfronet of the AGH University of Krakow, reportedly making it Poland’s fastest system. The new system, Helios, is Cyfronet’s fifth-generation supercomputer and will be used to advance artificial intelligence-driven scientific research and innovative commercial applications.

The Helios system is based on the HPE Cray EX supercomputer; it features three partitions: the first dedicated to traditional computational scientific research; the second purpose-built with NVIDIA GPUs to support AI applications and AI-driven research; and the third to support interactive workloads that involve big data processing. The supercomputer delivers a theoretical peak performance of 35 petaflops, which is over four times faster than Cyfronet’s previous flagship system. Helios will also provide 1.8 exaflops of peak AI performance, enabling researchers to use AI and drive scientific innovation through computing capabilities, the company reports.

With the upgrade to performance and engineering offered by the supercomputer, Cyfronet can now support growing demands for compute resources to advance scientific missions across chemistry, medicine, materials technology, astronomy, and environmental protection, according to HPE. The system will provide access to research communities across Poland’s public and private organizations, which include research institutes, municipalities, and hospitals.

Cyfronet needed Helios to be more energy-efficient than its previous systems. The HPE Cray EX supercomputer features liquid-cooling capabilities.

“Supercomputers have become the go-to platform for AI to efficiently support model training at scale,” says Trish Damkroger, senior vice president and general manager, high-performance computing AI Infrastructure Solutions at HPE. “With the new Helios system, an HPE Cray EX supercomputer, the Academic Computer Centre Cyfronet is gaining a significant increase in parallel processing computing power and purpose-built end-to-end capabilities to fuel large-scale research for its users.”

“For the past 50 years, Cyfronet has been helping advance Polish science, offering its computing capabilities to multiple researchers and institutions so they can achieve more complex and accurate results in a shorter time,” says Prof. Kazimierz Wiatr, director of ACC Cyfronet AGH. “To keep doing that, we needed to invest and build the new supercomputer with the most advanced architecture, high compute power, and AI capabilities. The HPE Cray EX supercomputer, used in the world’s fastest clusters, was the right choice.”

Helios consists of three partitions targeted for different types of workloads, serving both scientific communities and commercial customers:

HPE Cray Supercomputing EX with CPU partition, equipped with 75,264 “Zen 4” cores from 4th Gen AMD EPYC processors and 200 terabytes of DDR5 memory. This partition is targeted at modeling and simulation workloads, such as computational fluid dynamics used for wind turbines and propellers, car crash simulation tests, and medicine, such as beam simulations in proton therapy used in cancer treatment.

HPE Cray Supercomputing EX with GPU partition, equipped with 440 NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips, is targeted for image-intensive computer simulations in materials engineering, solid-state physics, drug discovery, and large-scale AI training, such as generative AI.

HPE Cray Supercomputing XD665 with “INT” partition, targeted for interactive work with big data, tuning AI models, and running applications that use AI for inference, is equipped with 24 NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs and high-speed NVMe local storage.

All components of the supercomputer are interconnected with HPE Slingshot, which provides 200 gigabits per second (Gbps) of high-performance networking  for higher speed and congestion control for data-intensive workloads, the company says. Based on HPE Cray technology, this tuneable interconnection supercharges performance for the entire system by enabling high-speed networking. Helios also has a total of 17.5 petabytes of Lustre file system storage built on the HPE Cray ClusterStor E1000 Storage System.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.

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