The European Space Agency (ESA) has partnered with HPE to deploy a supercomputer at ESRIN (European Space Research Institute), in Frascati, Italy.

Dubbed Space HPC, the ESA said the system has been designed to meet the growing computational needs of the European space industry and will have the ability to process large datasets, run complex simulations, and accelerate artificial intelligence applications.

Comprised of 108 Nvidia H100 GPUs and 34,000 CPU cores across AMD and Intel processors, the system provides 5 petaflops of compute performance and uses direct liquid cooling to boast a PUE of less than 1.09, the agency said.

The supercomputer also has 3.6 petabytes of SSD storage and is connected by Nvidia’s InfiniBand network offering, providing 500Gbps of bandwidth.

Space HPC will be freely available to SMEs and startups until the end of 2025, although the agency did note there was a limit on maximum usage.

“With this new facility, ESA is providing a flexible supercomputing infrastructure in support of R&D, testing, and rapid benchmarking for ESA programs, industrial players, and researchers,” said Josef Aschbacher, director general of ESA. “The Space HPC provides a critical infrastructure to power the connected digital economy in support of the European Green Deal and Digital Agenda. ESA remains at the service of the space community in its quest to become more agile and effective, keeping European citizens at the very heart of the work it does.”

Simonetta Cheli, director of Earth Observation Programmes and director of ESA ESRIN, added: “The ESA Space HPC at ESRIN will be the central ESA reference for any kind of high-performance computing need for research and development for any ESA Directorate and for our industrial partners. Earth Observation program – the largest program of ESA – is naturally a key actor in the HPC domain with a strong impact on Earth Observation data management and the development of novel applications and services.”