The European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) is spending €28 million ($31.26m) to upgrade the Leonardo supercomputer to better take on artificial intelligence (AI) workloads.
The JU put out a procurement call on September 19 for the acquisition, delivery, installation, and maintenance of the hardware and software of Lisa, Leonado's upgrade.
Lisa - AKA the Leonardo Improved Supercomputing Architecture - will be a partition optimized for Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications, and will better support the development of Large Language Models and multi-modal generative AI.
The EuroHPC JU is seeking to integrate next-generation GPUs and CPUs into Leonardo, as well as high-bandwidth memory, all of which is hoped to make Leonardo more efficient and precise in AI tasks.
Potential vendors must submit proposals by November 8.
In January 2023, the EuroHPC JU announced plans for a 100 petaflops upgrade, at the time also dubbed Lisa. It is unclear, however, what the upgrade will actually do for Leonardo's computing capacity.
HPCWire reports that the upgrade could see Leonardo getting a linpack performance boost from 45 to 65 petaflops in the new partition. The mixed precision performance boost or HPL-MxP could range from 300 petaflops to 650 petaflops.
The JU wants the new partition to be based on the x86 architecture and have at least 165 nodes - each with at least two CPUS, 8 GPUs, and 1TB of memory.
The GPU must be able to train models, “provide memory sharing with all the other GPUs installed in the same node," and the high bandwidth memory must provide at least 80 gigabytes. As HPCWire notes, this qualifies the latest GPUs from the likes of AMD and Nvidia. The current architecture is mostly built around Nvidia solutions.
The partition is expected to be delivered by April 2025, and installation completed by July 2025.
Plans for Leonardo were first announced in 2020, and it was inaugurated in 2022. The supercomputer is housed at CINECA in Bologna, Italy.
An Atos BullSequana XH2000 system with Xeon Platinum processors and Nvidia A100 GPU accelerators, Leonardo offered a sustained Linpack performance of 174.7 petaflops and a peak performance of 255.75 petaflops at the time of its launch.
Leonardo currently ranks 7th on the Top500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers, and 28th on the Green500 ranking.
Earlier this month, the EuroHPC JU launched a call for tender to find a vendor for the acquisition, delivery, installation, and maintenance of the Alice Recoque exascale supercomputer. May 2024 saw the first module of the EuroHPC JU Jupiter supercomputer launching, Europe's first exascale supercomputer.
