Inside Alps: One of the World's Fastest Supercomputers in Lugano, Switzerland

The Alps Supercomputer

• 💡 Alps is one of the world's most advanced supercomputers, located in Lugano, Switzerland, and represents the latest generation of high-performance computing.
• 🧠 It utilizes nearly 11,000 processors, making it vastly more powerful than thousands of standard laptops combined.

Sustainable Cooling System

• 💧 Alps is designed for sustainability, drawing glacial water from Lake Lugano for its cooling system, a departure from typical data centers.
• 🌡️ Water from the lake, around 7°C, is used in a heat exchanger to cool the supercomputer, with the warmed water (15-20°C) returned to the lake.
• ⚠️ The system has safeguards, including a raised floor and separated sectors, to manage potential water leaks and prevent damage.

Liquid Cooling Technology

• ⚡ Inside each of the 2,688 blades, liquid cooling is applied directly to the processors, including Grace and Hopper CPUs and H100 GPUs, due to their high power consumption.
• 🧊 Copper pipes circulate cold water to the processors and carry warm water back, ensuring efficient heat removal.

Climate Simulation and AI

• 🌍 Alps is used to crunch vast amounts of environmental data for global climate simulations, including forecasting sea level rise, glacial retreat, and extreme weather events.
• 📈 The supercomputer enables complex simulations, such as modeling the impact of rising CO2 levels on the planet, by running millions of computations across millions of grid points and altitude levels.
• 🔬 AI models are built using this data to create predictive models, allowing scientists to scale their understanding of environmental phenomena to a planetary level.

Innovation in HPC

• 🏞️ The supercomputer's location in a region known for extreme precipitation highlights the synergy between natural resources and advanced technology.
• ✅ Alps sets a standard for how supercomputers can operate efficiently and cool themselves without contributing to global warming.