HPC Vega — Slovenian peta-scale supercomputer powering scientific discovery

European Technology Platform (ETP) for High-Performance Computing (HPC) or ETP4HPC organized a conference today on the Vega system.

EuroHPC supercomputers with HPC Vega system, was hosted by IZUM in Maribor, Slovenia. Aleš Zemljak and Žiga Zebec from IZUM presented on Vega. IZUM is the Institute of Information Science, Maribor, Slovenia.

Slovenian peta-scale supercomputer
Aleš Zemljak gave an overview of HPC Vega: “HPC Vega — Slovenian Peta-scale Supercomputer”. He touched on the system’s design, architecture and installation, focusing on most user-relevant basic concepts of HPC, and their relation to HPC Vega.

HPC Vega.

HPC Vega is the Slovenian peta-scale supercomputer. HPC Vega is the most powerful Slovenian supercomputer. It is the first operational EuroHPC JU system, in production since April 2021. It has performance of 6.9 PFLOPS, uses Atos Sequana XH2000 and 1020 Compute nodes, Infiniband 100Gb/s. It has 18PB large capacity storage Ceph, and 1PB high performance storage Lustre. It consumes < 1MW power, and has PUE < 1.15.

App domains
HPC app domains include earth sciences, such as seismology, earthquake simulations and predictions, climate change, weather forecast, earth temperatures, ocean streams, forest fires, vulcano analysis, etc. High energy physics and space exploration, such as particle physics, large Hadron collider, project ATLAS trkalnik, astronomy, large synoptic survey telescope, Gaia satellite, supernovas, new stars, planets, sun, moon, etc.

Medicine, health, chemistry, molecular simulation, including diseases, drugs, vaccines, DNA sequencing, bioinformatics, molecular chemistry, etc. Mechanical engineering and computational liquid dynamics. Machine, deep learning, AI, etc., such as autonomous driving, walk simulations, speech and face recognition, robotics, language analytics, etc.

HPC Vega has 10 design goals. These are: general-purpose HPC for user communities, HPC compute intensive CPU/GPU partitions, high-performance data analytics (HPDA) extreme data processing, AI/ML, compute node WAN connectivity, hyper-converged network, remote access for job submission, good scalability for massively parallel jobs, fast throughput for large number of small jobs, and high sequential with random storage access.

EU projects (funded) are: interTwin, exploitation of HPC Vega environment, two FTEs (IZUM, JSI), starts, EPICURE, SMASH (MCSA cofunded), o-boarding first postdocs, etc. EUmaster4HPC is preparing an offer for summer internship.

Supporting projects/activities (non-funded) are: EuroCC SLING, MaX3 CoE, etc. Others are: European Digital Infrastructure Consortium (EDIC) – national resources reserved, high-level app support help for Leonardo, CASTIEL2, Container Forum, MultiXscale CoE, and EVEREST (Experiments for Validation and Enhancement of higher REsolution Simulation Tools).

Future is data centers and ‘Project NOO’. Project “Recuperation and Resilience Plan — NOO. The goal is to archive facilities for research data, space for hosting of equipment of public research institutions and universities, space for future HPC(s). The project is due to be completed in June 2026. We have EUR15.2 million for two data centers and the long-lasting storage for research data equipment.

We envision two identical facilities or buildings for two data centers. They will be located in Dravske elektrarne, Mariborski otok. Acquisition of land has been completed. The other one is JSI (nuclear research) reactor, at Podgorica, Montenegro. We will be using the ground floor for HPC, first floor for the research data archive, Arnes’s and hosted equipment. Slovenia is going to need a new supercomputer by end of 2026. EuroHPC JU co-funding is expected (this system is not part of this ‘Project NOO.

Powering scientific discovery
Dr. Žiga Zebec presented: “HPC Vega: Powering Scientific Discovery”, focusing on the science conducted on HPC Vega, or “use cases”.

Slovenian research facilities using HPC Vega are: Kemijsko Institut, lab for molecular modeling, Univerza v Lubljani, for cognition modeling lab, FMF, in physics department, Univerza v Maribou, lab of physical chemistry, and Institut Jozef Stefan, theroretical physics, experimental particle physics, reactor physics, Centre for Astrophysics and Cosmology, etc.

Major domestic projects are development of Slovene in a digital environment. Project goal is to meet needs for computational tools and services in language technologies for Slovene. Development of meteorological and oceanographic test models. Hospital smart development based on AI, with project goal to develop AI-based hospitals. Robot textile and fabric inspection and manipulation. It is to advance state-of-the-art of perception and inspection, and robotic manipulation of textile and fabric, and bridge technological gap in this industry.

We have Slovenian Genome project with systematic study of genomic variability of Slovenians. There can be faster and more reliable diagnostics of rare genetic diseases.

There are scientific projects running on the Slovenian share of HPC Vega. These include deep-learning ensemble for sea level and storm tide forecasting, All-Atom Simulations of cellular senescence (process of deterioration with age), first-principles catalyst screening, dynamics of opioid receptor, visual realism assessment of deepfakes, etc. Scientific projects are also running on EuroHPC share of HPC Vega such as understanding skin permeability with molecular dynamics simulations.

Vega is involved in several international projects. These include SMASH, interTwin, EUMaster4HPC, Epicure, etc.