LUMI highlights from the EuroHPC Summit Week 2025

This year’s EuroHPC Summit Week welcomed a record-breaking 1,000 participants to Kraków, under Poland’s EU presidency. The theme of the conference was “Connecting HPC, Quantum and AI Communities.” And that is exactly what the Summit was about – bringing people together discussing these topics, all critical to Europe’s digital sovereignty.

The opening plenary set the stage around this year’s theme, starting the interplay between HPC, Quantum and AI for the three days of the Summit.

The conference was opened by Henna Virkkunen, Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy of the European Commission. In her video speech, she addressed the European Union’s upcoming AI Factories and AI Gigafactories, highlighted Europe’s advantageous position in the quantum computing market, and emphasized Europe’s digital sovereignty.

“In these critical times for Europe, I cannot stress enough the importance of working together. United, we can build unique infrastructures to ensure our global leadership and sovereignty.”

Anders Dam Jensen, Executive Director of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, pointed out in his opening speech that in addition to the thirteen already announced AI Factories (author’s note: LUMI AI Factory being one of them), more AI Factories will be announced in May 2025. He also noted that we should not forget the importance of quantum computing, and that traditional HPC will also remain a crucial technology in the future.

The three days of the Summit were packed with insightful presentations, panel discussions, and interesting discussions during the long-enough breaks. Our colleagues from CSC brought many interesting facts to the Summit from the LUMI point of view.

AI Factories introduced

Kimmo Koski, Managing Director of CSC – IT Center for Science, was part of the opening day’s “AI Factories and Cloud Integration” session. He introduced the upcoming LUMI AI Factory and emphasized the importance of competence development, open data and collaboration to make the AI Factories a success.

Image: Kimmo Koski  presenting the upcoming LUMI AI Factory at the EuroHPC Summit Week 2025.

During the session dedicated to the EU’s flagship initiative, Destination Earth, Jenni Kontkanen, Development Manager for Digital Twin Technologies at CSC, explained how AI Factories will play their part in deepening our understanding of climate change.

“If we think about the Climate Digital Twin part of the Destination Earth, we can currently perform simulations at 5km spatial resolution — already extremely high compared to other current climate models. But with the upcoming LUMI-AI system, we will be able to achieve 1km resolution. So, AI Factories can really help resolve issues and answer questions like what kind of impacts climate change has on local levels worldwide. ”

Demoing LUMI’s features

One of the conference’s highlights was the demo lab, a platform where each hosting entity could showcase their systems, capabilities, and usage. On Tuesday morning, LUMI took the spotlight with an immersive experience led by a team of talented EUMaster4HPC students. They had developed scientifically and computationally complex codes and some more visually appealing ones to suit people from diverse backgrounds.

We extend our heartfelt thanks to Valerio Grillo, Arianna Amadini, Dimitar Penkov, Xavier L’Heureuse and Ekkehard Steinmacher for their invaluable help and dedication to the LUMI demo lab, and to Maciej Szpindler and Emmanuel Ory from the LUMI User Support Team for their mentorship and support!

Image: EUMaster4HPC students and their mentors at the EuroHPC Summit Week 2025.

Breakthroughs with LUMI

Nils Helset, CEO of DigiFarm, took the center stage in the plenary on Thursday at the Breakthroughs session. His company DigiFarm is transforming agricultural processes using HPC and AI: the company has leveraged LUMI’s computing power in its RDI development. Helset also thanked the EuroCC project and its support via EuroCC Norway, which had been crucial in taking the steps towards Tier-0 computing with LUMI.

Image: Nils Helset (big screen) talking at the EuroHPC Summit Week 2025.

Another example of LUMI’s use was given at the Breakthroughs session by Lucio Mayer, Professor & Director at the Department of Astrophysics, University of Zurich. His multidisciplinary research group is studying star formation which is central to our understanding of the universe – galaxy formation cannot be understood without understanding star formation and its consequences.

Professor Mayer also noted LUMI’s top-notch sustainability features, said to be as good as it gets. He also called the need for projects to incorporate environmental footprint assessments and reduction plans, particularly in areas such as computing.

Quantum at center stage

The third day included quantum-focused sessions. For the first time, the conference included a quantum insights area dedicated to showcasing different quantum computers. One of these systems, named VLQ, hosted at IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center, will be connected to LUMI.

A cross-cutting theme throughout the conference was collaboration in various forms. The Federations session brought tangible solutions to this on Thursday. Pekka Lehtovuori, Director of Advanced Computing Facility at CSC presented the EuroHPC Federation Platform project, which CSC is coordinating. This project will deploy and operate a platform for federating European resources including HPC, quantum computing and data management resources – a real one-stop-shop for accessing and utilizing EuroHPC JU’s systems and services to their fullest potential.

Image: Pekka Lehtovuori talking about the EuroHPC Federation Platform project at the EuroHPC Summit Week.

We want to thank the EuroHPC JU for organizing this successful event! See you in Cyprus next year!

Revisit the conference and see some of our highlights from this recap video:

Read also:

Presentations from the sessions are available on the event’s website.

Author: Anni Jakobsson, CSC – IT Center for Science