The European Space Agency (ESA) has launched the ESA Space HPC supercomputer platform, specifically designed to advance space research and technology in the European Union. The opening of the new facility took place on the territory of the ESA-owned ESRIN center in Italy, HPC Wire reports.
ESA Space HPC will support research and technology development across all ESA programmes, providing EU scientists and SMEs with access to computing power. The initiative aims to develop the use of high-performance computing (HPC) in the EU aerospace sector and will form the basis for larger initiatives in the future.
As reported on the project website, Space HPC was built with the participation of HPE. The supercomputer includes about 34 thousand cores of the latest generation Intel and AMD processors, 156 TB of RAM, 108 NVIDIA H100 accelerators, an all-flash storage subsystem with a capacity of 3.6 PB and a throughput of 500 GB/s, as well as a 400G InfiniBand interconnect. The total peak performance of the cluster is 5 Pflops (FP64). Space HPC uses direct liquid cooling, and the system’s PUE does not exceed 1.09. Excess heat is sent to heat the campus. A local solar power plant provides more than half of the cluster’s energy needs.
Italian officials said technological innovation in the space sector was a priority to ensure security and “strategic autonomy” and would contribute to the competitiveness of European industry. The local aerospace hub of Lazio is home to 250 companies and plays a key role in the development of avionics, electronics, radar, satellite technology and materials science.
The ESA management noted the potential of Space HPC for innovation in the EU space industry. The new facility will provide the agency with flexible supercomputer infrastructure for research and development, testing and benchmarking, support for ESA programs and industrial enterprises. Small and medium businesses, startups, etc. will also have access to the calculations.
Image source: ESA
It is also noted that the debut of Space HPC clearly demonstrated that ESA not only takes resources from member states, but can also give them a lot in return. It is stated that one of the key areas of activity where HPC platforms are required for ESA is Earth observation. The new capacities will ensure the management of observations, the development of new applications and services.
Space HPC will support complex workloads including modelling, engineering simulations, training of AI models, data analytics and visualisation, as well as other experiments that will help de-risk future space missions. This will enable ESA to improve the cost-effectiveness of projects and enable data sharing between different Agency programmes.
At the end of 2024, it was reported that seven EuroHPC AI factories would appear in the European Union in 2025, and in mid-February, information appeared that the European Union would allocate €200 billion to the development of AI in order to keep up with the US and China in this area. Last year, it was noted that the implementation of NASA missions was delayed due to outdated and overloaded supercomputers.