Pekka Manninen

Pekka Manninen is the Director of Science and Technology at the Advanced Computing Facility at CSC, the Finnish IT Center for Science. He has long experience in supercomputing and supercomputing infrastructures and he has been leading and involved in several pan-European e-infrastructure initiatives over the course of years. Most recently Pekka has been leading the efforts related to Europe's flagship supercomputer LUMI. He holds a PhD in theoretical physics and is an adjunct professor at the University of Helsinki.

Abstract

The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking has installed three leadership-class supercomputers in Europe. We will discuss one of these systems, LUMI, located in Kajaani, Finland. LUMI is currently the fastest supercomputer in Europe and in general one of the most powerful and advanced computing systems in the world. In this talk, I will present the technical architecture of the LUMI infrastructure and its status, some history with anecdotes, as well as plans and ambitions for the future. Then, the main theme of the talk will be an overview of the scientific showcases and achievements from the first months of LUMI, and what we expect to see in the future. These include, for example, contributions to Destination Earth initiative, work on large language models and breakthroughs from extreme-scale computing capabilities in many fields of computational science.