The Alps

supercomputer A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instruc ...

is a high-performance computer funded by the

Swiss Confederation Switzerland, officially the Swiss Confederation, is a landlocked country located in west-central Europe. It is bordered by Italy to the south, France to the west, Germany to the north, and Austria and Liechtenstein to the east. Switzerlan ...

through the

ETH Domain The Domain of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology (ETH Domain, , ) is a union of Swiss governmental universities and research institutions. It primarily consists of the following institutions: ;Federal institutes of technology * Swiss ...

, with its main location in

Lugano Lugano ( , , ; ) is a city and municipality within the Lugano District in the canton of Ticino, Switzerland. It is the largest city in both Ticino and the Italian-speaking region of southern Switzerland. Lugano has a population () of , and an u ...

. It is part of the

Swiss National Supercomputing Centre The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (; CSCS) is the national high-performance computing centre of Switzerland. It was founded in Manno, canton Ticino, in 1991. In March 2012, the CSCS moved to its new location in Lugano-Cornaredo. The main f ...

(CSCS), which provides computing services for selected scientific customers.Gioia da Silva
''ETH weiht einen der modernsten KI-Supercomputer der Welt ein.''
In: ''Neue Zürcher Zeitung'', 14 September 2024. Retrieved 26 September 2024 The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) was founded in 1991. This center operates a user lab for computing services. Examples in the past include the analysis of data from the

Large Hadron Collider The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. It was built by the CERN, European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008, in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists, ...

(LHC) at

CERN The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in Meyrin, western suburb of Gene ...

, data storage for the

X-ray laser An X-ray laser can be created by several methods either in hot, dense plasmas or as a free-electron laser in an accelerator. This article describes the x-ray lasers in plasmas, only. The plasma x-ray lasers rely on stimulated emission to gener ...

SwissFEL of the

Paul Scherrer Institute The Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) is a multi-disciplinary research institute for natural and engineering sciences in Switzerland. It is located in the Canton of Aargau in the municipalities Villigen and Würenlingen on either side of the Ri ...

, and simulations for weather forecasts by

MeteoSwiss MeteoSwiss, officially the Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology, is an office of the federal administration of Switzerland. It employs 290 people at locations in Zurich, Zurich Airport, Geneva, Locarno and Payerne. History Originally ...

. These computing services have been provided over time by increasingly powerful computing systems. Since 2020 and the commissioning of the high-performance computer HPE

Cray Cray Inc., a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is an American supercomputer manufacturer headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It also manufactures systems for data storage and analytics. Several Cray supercomputer systems are listed ...

EX, the name ''Alps'' has been used for the new computers. On September 14, 2024, the latest supercomputer ''Alps'' ''HPE Cray EX254n'' was inaugurated. Even beforehand, the planned performance of Alps was described as being able to train the

LLM A large language model (LLM) is a language model trained with Self-supervised learning, self-supervised machine learning on a vast amount of text, designed for natural language processing tasks, especially Natural language generation, language g ...

GPT-3 Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) is a large language model released by OpenAI in 2020. Like its predecessor, GPT-2, it is a decoder-only transformer model of deep neural network, which supersedes recurrence and convolution-based ...

from

OpenAI OpenAI, Inc. is an American artificial intelligence (AI) organization founded in December 2015 and headquartered in San Francisco, California. It aims to develop "safe and beneficial" artificial general intelligence (AGI), which it defines ...

in two days. This supercomputer is based on ''Grace Hopper GH200''

integrated circuits An integrated circuit (IC), also known as a microchip or simply chip, is a set of electronic circuits, consisting of various electronic components (such as transistors, resistors, and capacitors) and their interconnections. These components a ...

(ICs) from

Nvidia Nvidia Corporation ( ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware. Founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang (president and CEO), Chris Malachowsky, and Curti ...

and achieves a performance of 270 petaflops per second, which means 270 quadrillion operations per second. In June 2024, it ranks 6th (

TOP500 The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computing, distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these ...

list) among the world's fastest computers, although the in-house computers of

Meta Meta most commonly refers to: * Meta (prefix), a common affix and word in English ( in Greek) * Meta Platforms, an American multinational technology conglomerate (formerly ''Facebook, Inc.'') Meta or META may also refer to: Businesses * Meta (ac ...

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

Alphabet Inc. Alphabet Inc. is an American multinational technology conglomerate holding company headquartered in Mountain View, California. Alphabet is the world's third-largest technology company by revenue, after Amazon and Apple, the largest techno ...

/Google LLC, and

Oracle An oracle is a person or thing considered to provide insight, wise counsel or prophetic predictions, most notably including precognition of the future, inspired by deities. If done through occultic means, it is a form of divination. Descript ...

are likely more powerful, but their performance is not known. A panel of experts from various natural sciences decides who is allowed to use this new computer. The use by a research collaboration of EPFL and the

Yale Yale University is a private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701, Yale is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, and one of the nine colonial colleges ch ...

Institute for Global Health has already been approved. This research group uses an open-source AI model from Meta and trained it on Alps with health data from medical research. With Alps, scientists in Switzerland receive an infrastructure to exploit many possibilities of

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

(AI). The new supercomputer is used as part of the ''Swiss AI Initiative'' by the

ETH Zurich ETH Zurich (; ) is a public university in Zurich, Switzerland. Founded in 1854 with the stated mission to educate engineers and scientists, the university focuses primarily on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. ETH Zurich ran ...

and EPFL.

Structure

To suitably house and operate modern supercomputers, a new data center building and an adjacent office building were constructed in Lugano-Cornaredo. The data center building consists of three floors. The lowest floor houses the basic infrastructure with primary power and water distribution as well as an emergency power supply via batteries. The

cooling Cooling is removal of heat, usually resulting in a lower temperature and/or Phase transition, phase change. Temperature lowering achieved by any other means may also be called cooling. The Heat transfer, transfer of Internal energy, thermal energ ...

of the computers and the buildings in summer is done with lake water from Lake Lugano. From a depth of 45 meters, 460 liters of cold lake water per second are supplied to the data center via 2.8 km long pipes. There, it cools the internal cooling circuit of the computer via a heat exchanger. The secondary distribution is done on the middle floor using power distribution units, which allow flexible installation of the computers above. The computers are located on the top floor. The latest Alps highly-parallel supercomputer was delivered by

Hewlett Packard Enterprise The Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company (HPE) is an American multinational information technology company based in Spring, Texas. It is a business-focused organization which works in servers, storage, networking, containerization software and ...

(HPE), which acquired the supercomputer-specialized company Cray as a subsidiary in 2019. It is installed on an area of 2000 m².

Electronics

In order to achieve superior performance, combinations of central processors (

CPU A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor, or just processor, is the primary processor in a given computer. Its electronic circuitry executes instructions of a computer program, such as arithmetic, log ...

s) with graphics processors (

GPU A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed for digital image processing and to accelerate computer graphics, being present either as a discrete video card or embedded on motherboards, mobile phones, personal ...

s) as well as their associated memories (128 GB LPDDR-5X RAM; 96 GB HBM-3)''Alps: System Specification.''
cscs.ch. Retrieved 1 October 2024 are placed in close proximity on the same monolithic integrated circuit provided by

. Arrays of 72 CPUs are called ''Grace'' and consist of

ARM In human anatomy, the arm refers to the upper limb in common usage, although academically the term specifically means the upper arm between the glenohumeral joint (shoulder joint) and the elbow joint. The distal part of the upper limb between ...

v9-Neoverse-V2 processors, which are

RISC In electronics and computer science, a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) is a computer architecture designed to simplify the individual instructions given to the computer to accomplish tasks. Compared to the instructions given to a comp ...

processors. The 132 GPUs are called ''Hopper H100 Tensor Core''. The combinations of said 72 CPUs together with 132 GPUs integrated on a VLSI chip are called ''GH200 Grace Hopper'' in memory of

Grace Hopper Grace Brewster Hopper (; December 9, 1906 – January 1, 1992) was an American computer scientist, mathematician, and United States Navy rear admiral. She was a pioneer of computer programming. Hopper was the first to devise the theory of mach ...

. A total of 1'305'600 processor cores (CPUs and GPUs) are available on this Alps system. Data exchanges between the 2'688 nodes occur on an

Ethernet Ethernet ( ) is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 198 ...

-type network called ''Slingshot-11'' at a rate of 200 Gbit/s. A single node is composed of four GH200, in a ''Quad GH200'' configuration. Every Quad GH200 node acts as a single NUMA system, with 288 CPU cores and 4 GPUs. The Grace CPUs communicate through a cache-coherent interconnect, while the Hopper GPUs communicate through NVLink.

Operation

A team from CSCS develops special software for different applications. The power consumption of the computer at full load is 10 MW. The electricity costs are estimated to be around 15 million CHF per year. The development of the Alps supercomputer involved an investment of approximately CHF100 million, with an annual operating budget of CHF37 million in 2024. As of November 2024, Alps is ranked 7th on the

list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, achieving a performance of 434.9

petaflops Floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance in computing, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate measu ...

per second. More powerful systems are currently located in countries such as the United States, Japan, and Italy.

Environmental impact

In 2025, ''

Swissinfo SWI swissinfo.ch is a Swiss Multilingualism, multilingual international news and information company based in Bern. It is a part of the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation (SRG SSR). Its content is Swiss-centred, with top priority given to in-depth ...

'' reported that the Alps supercomputer is powered entirely by

hydropower Hydropower (from Ancient Greek -, "water"), also known as water power or water energy, is the use of falling or fast-running water to Electricity generation, produce electricity or to power machines. This is achieved by energy transformation, ...

, with minimal direct CO₂ emissions. The cooling water used by the system is repurposed to supply hot water to the city of

. Alps consumes an average of seven megawatts of electricity, equivalent to the usage of 10,000 Swiss households. While its carbon emissions are minimal, researchers have noted concerns about the broader environmental footprint, including pressure on energy grids and water consumption. Proponents of the system have cited its role in advancing climate and medical research as a justification for its energy and resource use.{{Cite web , date=14 January 2025 , title=What's the environmental cost of Switzerland's new supercomputer? , url=https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/science/whats-the-environmental-cost-of-switzerlands-new-supercomputer/88720218 , access-date=1 April 2025 , website=SWI swissinfo.ch

References

Supercomputers Massively parallel computers

Structure

Electronics

Operation

Environmental impact

See also

References