ESA Cuts The Ribbon On 34,000-core Space HPC Center Tailored For Space Workloads

The European Space Agency this week inaugurated its new supercomputing facility built with HPE.

The Space HPC facility in Italy – click to enlarge

The aptly named "SpaceHPC" facility is billed as being "demonstrator infrastructure" designed to help Europe's space industry "mitigate risks associated with data processing, modelling, and simulations."

Located in the Italian town of Frascati, 20km outside Rome, Space HPC houses a machine packing 34,000 cores' worth of the "latest generation of AMD & Intel processors." 108 Nvidia H100 GPUs are also present, giving the machine 5 petaflops of raw performance potential.

That power would see Space HPC ranked in around 210th place on the current Top 500 List of Earth's mightiest supercomputers.

The machine uses InfiniBand networking, packs 156 TB of RAM, and includes 3.6 PB of solid state disk storage.

Direct liquid cooling allowed it to bag a power usage effectiveness score of "below 1.09." The machine is also plumbed into the heating system of the campus where it resides.

As is usually the case with supercomputers, Space HPC can be configured to run different workloads. The machine therefore offers partitions dedicated to general compute tasks, and two other partitions that take advantage of the H100s to run AI/ML workloads or other software that needs accelerators.

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ESA's Space Safety Programme has already tested Space HPC to improve its ability to – you guessed it – model space weather. Among other things, it can improve warnings of future solar activity that could pose a danger to infrastructure in orbit or on the ground.

Despite Wednesday's inauguration ceremony the facility remains in its pilot phase until at least April.

"Broader access is planned thereafter, in a ramp-up mode to ensure optimal performance and user experience," the ESA said.

The org is, however, already considering expressions of interest for time on the machine at a form you can find here. ®