Norway’s most powerful supercomputer has been inaugurated at the Lefdal Mine Datacenter (LMD) in Nordfjordeid, in the west of the country.

The 225 million NOK ($22.6m) supercomputer has been named Olivia, a tribute to the mineral olivine, which was mined where the data center is now housed.

Procured and operated by state-owned company Sigma2, the HPE Cray Supercomputing EX system will support research across various sectors, including climate, health, oceans, and artificial intelligence (AI). It’s comprised of 304 Nvidia GH200 GPUs and 64,512 AMD Epyc Turin CPU cores. Interconnected by HPE Slingshot, the system also boasts 5.3PB of storage capacity.

The system is cooled using cold water from a nearby fjord will be pumped into the system to cool it, while heated return water will be reused by local businesses.

Olivia offers 13.2 petaflops of sustained Linpack Performance, and a theoretical peak of 16.80 petaflops, according to the Green500 list, with a power consumption of just 219kW. It offers 60.274 gigaflops of performance per watt.

On the most recent edition of the Green500 list of the world’s most energy-efficient supercomputers, Olivia ranked 22nd. It ranked 117th on the Top500 list of most powerful systems.

Sigma previously claimed Olivia will have 17 times the computational power of the country’s existing national offering, the 6.2 petaflops Betzy, which would have put Olivia at around 105.4 petaflops of compute.

Future expansion of Olivia is also possible, with the system designed to accommodate up to 119,808 CPU cores or 224 additional GPUs.

“Today marks the beginning of a new era for research and artificial intelligence in Norway,” said Sigrun Aasland, minister of research and higher education.

“With Olivia, Norwegian researchers gain the ability to perform calculations that were previously beyond reach in this country. Now, Norway’s research community will have access to the tools they need to keep up with a rapidly advancing field.”

First announced in 2015 and opened in 2017, LMD is potentially Europe’s largest data center in floor space. Located 60 meters (197 ft) below ground and 700 meters (2,297 ft) inside a mountain, the data center has up to 120,000 sqm (1.3 million sq ft) in 75 underground halls – although the vast majority of the caverns remain empty.

In April 2023, Lefdal added 60MW power capacity to its underground data center campus, adding a connection to the regional 132kV power network that increased the available power to the data center from 20MW to 80MW.