Getting familiar with LUMI: roadshows and kick-off events throughout Europe

To prepare LUMI’s potential future users for the new supercomputer, the LUMI consortium countries have organized a series of LUMI roadshow/kick-off events and webinars throughout Europe.

In these events, the potential users of LUMI have been familiarized with LUMI’s state-of-the-art architecture and how different user groups should prepare for the system, for example, by optimizing software codes to the new GPU-based (Graphics Processing Units) environment. The LUMI consortium has also gathered valuable information from these events: use cases, expectations, and requirements from the potential end-users have been collected to support the development of LUMI.

In case you missed the events and would like to learn more about LUMI and its architecture, how it can be utilized and what benefits it will bring to different user groups, have a look at the presentation by Pekka Manninen, Director of LUMI Leadership Computing Facility below:

LUMI showcased throughout Europe

In addition to the more general LUMI information, many of these events had guest speakers from different scientific fields, presenting the vast opportunities LUMI will bring to their research area.

The Belgian LUMI kick-off, organized by 10+ partners across the Belgian HPC community, took place in January and had over 250 participants. Several possible use cases for LUMI were identified in the event, and participants also learned more about the newly launched EuroCC project’s National Competence Center. The presentation videos from the event are viewable on Vlaams Supercomputer Centrum’s website.

IT4Innovations national supercomputing center in the Czech Republic organized the LUMI roadshow in February. The event had 50 participants. The Czech LUMI pilot call was announced, and the local EuroCC Competence Center was also introduced in the event.

The Finnish LUMI roadshow consisted of ten (10) events during autumn 2020 and spring 2021. The situation with the covid-19 pandemic in Finland was so calm in autumn 2020 that two of these events were possible to carry out in the good old way: face-to-face. One of these physical events took place in Kajaani, the home of LUMI, and participants of the event had a chance to visit the LUMI data center construction site! Additionally, CSC surveyed Finnish end-users and discussed with over twenty Finnish research groups their specific needs for LUMI. You can read more about the Finnish roadshow on CSC’s website. CSC organized the roadshow as part of the EuroCC National Competence Center’s activities.

In Sweden, the online LUMI roadshow attracted 67 participants from different disciplines in academia as well as public administration and private enterprises. The roadshow was organized by EuroCC National Competence Center Sweden (ENCCS). The considerable interest resulted in an engaging Q&A session about LUMI’s features, functionality, and accessibility options both from potential future users and support staff who will be assisting Swedish LUMI users. The summary of the Q&A session is available on the ENCCS website. This was the first in the series of LUMI roadshow events in Sweden. The upcoming two events will be hosted on 8 April and 8 September 2021 and will be accompanied with tutorials on how to apply to EuroHPC JU system access calls and particularly to LUMI.

A LUMI webinar was carried out in Denmark in early February. The event was organized by DeiC and it had 63 participants.

Forthcoming events and FAQ

Similar sessions in Europe will be arranged during the coming months. The next one is the Data Science Seminar: High-Performance Computing: Big Is Beautiful, organized by the University of Tartu Institute of Computer Science on 31 March. Registration for this event is open, and keep an eye on the other forthcoming events at the events section on the LUMI website.

The LUMI FAQ will also be updated soon to answer some of the most commonly asked questions during the LUMI events.

Authors: Anni Jakobsson and Jonna Helenius, CSC – IT Center for Science, Tim Jaenen, FWO – the Research Foundation in Flanders