The university has received new high-performance computers. ROSA, STORM and MOUSE replace the previous CARL and EDDY computers.
A huge crane behind building A14 carefully lifts several 2.50 metre high, black cabinets to dizzying heights, each of them weighing between 700 and 1200 kilograms. This spectacle has taken place twice on our campus in recent months: during the delivery of the university's new high-performance computers.
In February and July, five of these so-called racks reached their destination, the Data Centre on the 4th floor, through a roof hatch in building A01. There was no other option: the supercomputers were too large for the goods lift.
The cabinets house a total of 161 computer servers. These networked computing nodes enable parallel calculations with over three quadrillion computing operations per second and internal data transfer rates of up to 100 gigabits per second. The new computing cluster operated by IT services will therefore be around five times faster overall than the previous system with the CARL and EDDY mainframes, which have been in use since 2016.
The new mainframes are financed by various project funds and supported by the German Research Foundation, the NBank, the Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Protection and the Ministry of Science and Culture of Lower Saxony. ROSA can be used for computationally intensive research projects by all members of the university. STORM and MOUSE are used for wind energy research.
Anyone who needs special computing power for their research can contact the Central Research Institution for Scientific Computing, whose team supports researchers in using the high-performance computers with training and specialist advice, among other things.
Incidentally, the university feeds a large proportion of the waste heat from the new cluster into its heating system.
