Northern Data Kicks off HPC Megaproject
FRANKFURT AM MAIN, Germany:
- Computing power 3.1 Exaflops
- Partners Gigabyte and AMD deliver hardware
- Financing secured by anchor customer
Northern Data AG (XETRA: NB2, ISIN: DE000A0SMU87) has kicked off the deployment of a USD 200 million high performance computing (HPC) megaproject. The new project will be one of the world’s largest GPU-based distributed computing clusters for HPC applications and will be located at sites in Norway, Sweden and Canada. The full hardware and construction costs are financed by an anchor customer.
CEO Aroosh Thillainathan explains: “Northern Data is more than on track with its ambitious growth goals. With our new GPU cluster, we can offer our customers HPC applications with maximum scalability and the highest time- and cost-efficiency. An important factor for this is our strong partnership with Gigabyte and AMD, which I am particularly pleased about. The significant financial commitment of a blue-chip anchor customer is a very powerful sign for the quality of this partnership, and we are receiving a very positive response from potential further customers.”
In its final expansion stage, the cluster is expected to provide FP32 computing power of approximately 3.1 exaflops (3.1 million teraflops and 274.54 petaflops FP64). It will perform HPC applications such as rendering, artificial intelligence and deep learning for Northern Data customers. Figures in terms of computing power show that the world’s fastest supercomputer, the Japanese “Fukagu” (Fujitsu), has a calculation power of 1.07 exaflops FP32 and 415.3 petaflops FP64, whereas the second fastest, the US supercomputer “Summit” (IBM) has a calculation power of 0.414 exaflops FP32 and 148.0 petaflops FP64.
Delivery of the hardware will begin in the coming weeks. Gigabyte builds the high-performance servers and combines the AMD processors selected by Northern Data with a specific server architecture. A distributed computing cluster shares software across multiple computer systems to increase efficiency and performance.
The project will start making revenues immediately after installment has been finished, which is now expected to be within the first half of 2021.
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