On Monday (22 August 2016), two new high-performance computers were delivered to replace the former FLOW and HERO systems at the end of the year 2016. The new racks were installed with the help of a crane over the roof into the data centre of the IT services.

A total of around 5 million euros were invested in the new high-performance computers, which are financed in various ways. One of the two supercomputers is a large-scale research device, financed half each by the university and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation), and will serve as the university's central resource for computing-intensive research projects in the future. The second high-performance computer was procured by ForWind as part of a project sponsored by the Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Energie (Federal Ministry of Economics and Energy) that deals with issues in the field of wind energy research.

The two new clusters of pro-com/Lenovo have more than 10,000 computing cores and over 80TB main memory. An FDR Infiniband Interconnect enables parallel computing across the entire cluster. A parallel file system (GPFS) with approx. 900TB storage capacity provides fast data storage. In addition, ultra-fast flash adapters for particularly high I/O requirements can be used in some computing nodes.

The installation of the new systems in the data center of the IT services as well as extensive functional and performance tests will take place in the next few weeks. The high-performance computer will then be officially put into operation at the beginning of December. The computing power of the cluster can then be used for research by all working groups of the university. If this is of interest, further information can be found on the Scientific Computing website.

Futher Information

More pictures: Galerie1 Galerie2
University press release: Link