University of Luxembourg
Founded in 2003, the University of Luxembourg (UL) is the first and only public university of the Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg. Multilingual, international and research-oriented, the UL is a modern institution with a personal atmosphere, close to European institutions, innovative companies and the financial place.
With nearly 6,200 students and 1,700 employees from all over the globe, the UL offers a unique mix of international excellence and national relevance, delivering knowledge for society and businesses. The UL priorities for research are computational sciences & ICT (including High Performance Computing developments), systems biomedicine, law and European law, international finance and educational sciences. UL research teams involve 860 professional experts (scientific and research staff), 610 PhD students, and 241 professors, assistant professors and senior lecturers, working in the three UL faculties and two interdisciplinary centres.
HPC @ UL
The UL implemented the first public HPC platform in Luxembourg in 2007. Today, the UL HPC platform is the largest facility of this type in Luxembourg (after GoodYear industrial R&D Center) and is competitive with similar centers in the Greater Region.
Built on top of specialized HPC equipment from industry-leading vendors such as Bull, Dell, HP, EMC and SGI, the UL HPC facility encompasses both a High Performance Computing environment (more than 522 computing nodes, around 5300 CPU cores and 120,000 GPU cores, offering a total 161 TeraFlops) and high density storage (5.1 PetaBytes). The bridge between computing and storage is a specificity of the UL service, with reasons both legal (certain data must not move out of the country) and performance related.
The UL HPC center promotes interdisciplinary research and education by providing state-of-the-art High-Performance Computing and Storage services for the members of the University of Luxembourg and their external partners. Through our commitment to excellence and continuous improvement, we strive to facilitate and accelerate scientific discovery and innovation while seeking to provide HPC services at the national level. More specifically, the UL HPC facility targets a broad spectrum of workloads from CPU-intensive, I/O intensive and memory intensive software, coming from application domains such as financial analytics, modeling and simulation for engineering and life sciences. The UL HPC center has also developed deep technological expertise in infrastructure deployment, which contains specialized large memory nodes for in-memory huge dataset processing, energy-efficient systems for loosely coupled BigData analytics and dense accelerator systems with state of the art GPUs. The expertise spans also R&D software environment creation comprising hundreds of high-level simulation and modeling applications and libraries, commercial or developed by the community.
The core contributions of the UL HPC center to the ETP4HPC consist in providing its expertise of integrating HPC hardware and software required for scientific and industrial competitiveness, providing the technical know-how that enables the optimal use of these resources to interested parties and in maintaining a knowledge base of best-practices in the use of HPC applications and management of associated data.
