More than 60 projects have been submitted to the 23 experts from all over the world who work at LuxProvide, which manages the High Performance Computer. Purchased from IT company Atos, the super computer has an average lifespan of five years which makes it necessary for its activity to become profitable as soon as possible, even before deciding to acquire a more modern model in two years' time.

Companies, startups and research centres are at very different stages of maturity with regard to high performance computing. Hence the creation, more than a year ago, of the National Competence Centre, designed as a one-stop shop for companies. It will then be guided towards a proof of concept that will be run on Meluxina. The result can then be re-injected into the company’s production, and the skills centre can even train the staff required to manage the modelling tool.

SES and RSS Hydro along for the celebration

LuxProvide invited satellite giant SES and  Fit4Start start-up RSS Hydro to the occasion. For SES chief commercial officer , HPC has made it possible to respond to a profound business transformation. Until now, SES rented capacity to a company that needed connectivity. Except that 30 years ago, the customer rented capacity whether or not they used it. Today, the practice is pay per use. And instead of 10 beams, modern satellites have 200, which must be controlled at the same time and according to customer needs. SES had to finalise software capable of performing this control, capable of responding to all types of requests. This meant hours and hours of calculations and modelling.

RSS Hydro’s CEO Guy Schumann considers that it is a matter of using satellite images and drone images to model the impact of heavy rainfall on the soil and the population. As part of Luxinnovation's Fit4Start, the space start-up is expected to develop a model for two types of client for the time being: municipalities (to enable them to better manage construction in risk areas, for example, to identify populations in risk areas) and insurers (to establish their price offer or to ensure the reality of claims submitted to them).

There are and contacts have been made with large groups such as ArcelorMittal, Goodyear or Husky, but Luxembourg's offer is aimed at all companies, said Fayot.

“The year has gone by very quickly,” said LuxProvide CEO . The state-of-the-art facility sells “HPC as a service”--green HPC thanks to the energy produced right next door by Kyowatt. “We are a small but strategic structure for many companies, as we provide Meluxina computing power as a service for industries, SMEs and start-ups. So far, more than 200 companies from 15 different economic sectors have already expressed their interest in using Meluxina. With more than 60 projects already running on our supercomputer, we are still in the early stages. I'm calling on all companies to contact us to analyse together how we can help them boost their business with the supercomputer.”

With a maximum peak computing power of 18 petaflops (corresponding to 18 million billion computational operations per second), Meluxina ranks among the top 50 high-performance computers in the world.

This story was first published in French on . It has been translated and edited for Delano.