A Norwegian supercomputer facility is capturing waste heat from computing to warm salmon farms.

Norway's scientific computing division Sigma2 has completed the Olivia supercomputer, built by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which combines AMD CPUs with Nvidia Superchips to deliver a 16-fold boost to the nation's computing capacity. The system is located in an underground datacenter deep within the Lefdal Mines and integrates 504 of AMD's latest Turin CPUs with 304 of Nvidia's Grace Hopper Superchips, alongside 5.3 petabytes of HPE Lustre storage connected via HPE's 200 Gbps Slingshot 11 network interface cards.

The Nvidia Grace Hopper Superchips, though not Nvidia's latest accelerators, are among the most energy-efficient ever made. Each chip combines Nvidia's 72-core Grace CPUs with a 144 GB H100 graphics accelerator and operates at 1,000 watts, capable of delivering upwards of 67 teraFLOPS of FP64 matrix math for highly precise scientific workloads, or as much as 4 petaFLOPS of sparse FP8 for machine learning tasks. In the fall's Top500 ranking of the most powerful publicly known supercomputers, Olivia's GPU partition took 134th place, delivering 13.2 petaFLOPS in the High-Performance Linpack benchmark.

The combination of the Nvidia-based GPU partition and the AMD-based CPU section enables Olivia to address a broader range of high-performance computing and AI workloads. While many scientific workloads benefit heavily from the highly parallel processing afforded by GPUs, not all do, making the two partitions essential for handling diverse computational needs. The system is expected to support research into renewable energy, including hydroelectric power, climate modeling, marine science, health, and language, with access extending across the nation to researchers beyond Sigma2.

Olivia stands as Norway's most powerful supercomputer to date and among its most sustainable, cutting power consumption by 30 percent compared to its predecessor Betzy. The liquid-cooled Cray EX4000 compute blades are designed so that Sigma2 eventually aims to reuse the waste heat generated to warm water for local salmon farms. As Helge Stranden, senior advisor for HPC and storage at Sigma2, stated: "Olivia marks a new chapter for Norwegian research. By combining cutting-edge performance with the unique energy efficiency of the Lefdal Mine Datacenter, we're not only accelerating scientific discovery, we're doing so responsibly."