The National Technical University of Athens has put Greece’s most powerful university supercomputer into operation

The National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) has put a new high-performance computing infrastructure into operation, centered around the ICARUS supercomputer. The system is the most powerful of its kind at a Greek university and will be used for artificial intelligence, machine learning, scientific simulations, and big data processing, BalkanEngineer.com learned from a press release issued by the university.

ICARUS features 24 computing nodes, each of which integrates two NVIDIA Grace Hopper GH200 Superchips. This configuration results in a total of 48 combined CPU–GPU modules and a computational performance of over 2 PetaFLOPS for FP64 operations. According to the university, these specifications rank the system among the most powerful high-performance computing infrastructures at European universities. The new resource is designed for tasks where high computational capacity is critical. These include training complex models and neural networks, large-scale scientific simulations, computational engineering, climate and energy modeling, as well as the analysis of large volumes of data. The GPU architecture also enables applications requiring massive parallel processing.

Along with ICARUS, the university is also implementing its own cloud infrastructure based on the open-source OpenStack platform. It will serve as a shared resource for faculty, researchers, and students, who will have access to virtual machines, storage space, network services, and the ability to build environments tailored to specific research projects.

The investment was made possible through funding from the Greek “Universities of Excellence” program. According to local media outlet PowerGame, the total cost of the new infrastructure amounts to 4 million euros.

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