363rd place: The university's two new high-performance computers CARL and EDDY have made it into the top 500 of the world's fastest computing clusters. In the prestigious list - recently published as part of the "Supercomputing" conference in Salt Lake City (USA) - the Oldenburg system as a whole is listed with 457,200,000,000,000 computing operations per second (457.2 TFlop/s). This means that IT services also operate one of the fastest computing clusters for university research in Germany.
"The inclusion of our mainframe computers in the list of 'supercomputers' is far more than prestige. It is impressive proof of the excellent conditions that the University of Oldenburg offers its scientists," says University President Prof Dr Dr Hans Michael Piper.
In future, CARL will be used for computationally intensive research projects in the fields of energy of the future, neuroscience and hearing research as well as marine research and biodiversity. In total, more than 200 scientists from over 30 research groups will benefit. Prof Dr Thorsten Klüner, Director of the Institute of Chemistry, is one of the main users. He describes his subject: "The simulation of quantum chemical processes is becoming increasingly important and requires ever greater computing power. With the new cluster, we are ideally positioned in Oldenburg."
EDDY will support the Oldenburg turbulence researchers at ForWind - the centre for wind energy research at the universities of Oldenburg, Hanover and Bremen - in the precise calculation of the flow and wind physics of wind turbines. Prof Dr Joachim Peinke, physicist and ForWind board member: "The new high-performance computer is an outstanding piece of equipment for the highly complex meteorological and aerodynamic flow calculations planned in the research."
Both computers will also be used to prepare large-scale projects on the parallel computers of the "North German Network for High Performance Computing" and the federal government's supercomputers.
The Oldenburg computing power is financed by two funding sources: one computer is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the state of Lower Saxony, while the second was procured by the Centre for Wind Energy Research ForWind with funds from the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy. The total investment volume amounts to five million euros.