The Swedish Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm is getting a 13.5PFlop/s supercomputer named“Dardel”. The machine will be supplied by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE),  featuring AMD’s EPYC processors and Instinct GPU accelerators.

The supercomputer is named in honour of the Swedish author Thora Dardel and her husband, the painter Nils Dardel. It will replace the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing’s current flagship system to focus on subjects such as computational fluid dynamics, biophysics and quantum chemistry.

“We have recently seen a dramatic increase in the need for researchers to use accelerators – mainly in the form of GPUs. We will soon be able to meet that demand through the accelerator partition in Dardel,” said Prof. Hans Karlsson, Director of Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC).

The Dardel system will be installed in two phases. HPE will deliver the CPU partition and a storage system before the summer. This initial phase of the computer will provide scientists with about 65,000 CPU cores for performing their research calculations. The second phase of Dardel comprises a GPU partition, to be delivered in the autumn. Researchers will start using the first phase of Dardel from July this year and the second from January 2022.

KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm was founded in 1827 and is today considered one of Europe’s leading technical and engineering universities and a key centre of innovation. It is Sweden’s largest technical research and learning institution. Current projects include sustainable solutions for climate change, energy supply, urbanisation and quality of life for the rapidly-growing elderly population.

“We are addressing these with world-leading, high-impact research and education in natural sciences and all branches of engineering, as well as in architecture, industrial management, urban planning, history and philosophy. Almost two-thirds of the SEK 4 billion turnover relates to research,” said Karlsson.