Case Study: EPFL achieves a 475 TFLOPS HPC upgrade with Huawei

Huawei Succeeds in Upgrading HPC System for EPFL

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), a leading university in engineering and natural sciences, needed to upgrade and expand its aging HPC environment to keep pace with growing research demands. The existing system had become insufficient, and EPFL required a scalable, open, and easy-to-manage solution that could support demanding scientific, engineering, biology, and medical applications. Huawei, working with Transtec, provided the high-performance computing platform and storage technologies used in the upgrade.

Huawei implemented an HPC solution based on 408 FusionServer XH620 compute nodes, InfiniBand networking, and six OceanStor 5800 storage systems with GPFS, delivering a theoretical peak of 475.2 TFLOPS and 350 TB of shared storage. The final deployment met EPFL’s requirements, achieved a measured performance of 401 TFLOPS with 84.4% efficiency, and reduced the required cabinet count to six while improving power efficiency. Huawei’s high-density FusionServer X6800 technology also helped increase single-cabinet computing capacity by 70% and cut cabinet usage by 40%.

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)

Vittoria Rezzonico

Executive Officer