Athena supercomputer
Athena achieves the theoretical computing power of over 7.7 PFlops, which gave the machine 155th place on the TOP500 list in November 2023 and made it the fastest supercomputer in Poland in the period before the installation of Helios. Athena, installed in Cyfronet in 2021, provides the Polish scientific community and innovative economy with the most modern computing resources based on the latest generation GPGPU processors and accelerators along with the necessary data storage subsystem based on very fast flash memories. Athena's configuration includes: 48 servers with AMD EPYC processors and 1 TB of RAM (6,144 CPU compute cores in total) as well as 384 NVIDIA A100 GPGPU cards.
The indispensable element enabling the use of such high computing power in an effective way is the provision of a high-performance internal network of a supercomputer (Infiniband HDR with 4 x 200 Gb/s bandwidth per server) and a very fast disk subsystem. It is built on the basis of the Lustre open source software, currently used in Ares and Prometheus supercomputers, and dedicated disk servers equipped with flash memory in the NVMe standard. The system was installed in the existing Cyfronet data center and integrated with the PLGrid infrastructure. Athena's computing power for AI computing is almost 240 PetaFlops.
Moreover, Athena was ranked 9th in the Green500 list of the most ecological supercomputers in June 2022. The main criterion (energy efficiency) is calculated as the ratio of the number of floating-point operations per second (computing power of a supercomputer) to energy consumption: Gflops/W.
The Athena's architecture meets the needs of users of Cyfronet supercomputers, who use the computing infrastructure both to perform standard high-performance scientific simulations (HPC) and to apply artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) methods in order to conduct research in the field of medicine, pharmacology, biology, chemistry, physics and many other fields of science.
Athena supercomputer