Leibniz Supercomputing Centre in Garching expands its Computing Power

Garching, November 12th 2007 – The Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) in Garching near Munich will strongly expand the computing power of its Linux cluster within the next weeks. The investment of about 2 mio EUR will be used for the new acquisition of compute clusters and for the expansion of the existing systems.

The Chemnitz located MEGWARE Computer GmbH, which placed two HPC clusters in the Top500 this year, will deliver four compute clusters with 1,964 processor cores in total. Accounting for the problem of climate change and increasing energy costs, energy efficient processors have been chosen for the installation.

One compute cluster with 928 cores in dual-socket/dual-core nodes is used for serial capacity computing. Users from the Munich universities run standard software packages or programs developed by themselves on these nodes.

One compute cluster with 304 cores in quad-socket/dual-core nodes, linked by 10Gbit Ethernet is used for moderately parallel programs and capacity computing. These nodes will also be used by the Munich universities, running standard applications, especially in chemistry.

One compute cluster with 388 cores in quad-core nodes is partially used for the bibliographic scanning project of the Bavarian state library and a project with Google. The other part serves for the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider of the European particle physics laboratory CERN. Scientists of the physics department of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich (LMU) and the Max-Planck Institute for physics (MPP) analyse the observations from the large energy collision experiments in ATLAS. A storage cluster with about 140 TBytes capacity is also dedicated to the ATLAS group of LMU and MPP.

The Stuttgart circular Informationssysteme GmbH will deliver another cluster comprised of 15 nodes with eight dual-core processors each, linked by 10Gbit Ethernet. This 320 core cluster is dedicated to the following chairs within the mathematics department of the Technical University Munich (TUM): Numerical Mathematics and Control Theory, Applied Mathematics, and Mathematical Optimization. They will use the cluster for parallel simulations and complex optimization calculations.

Finally, SGI will deliver a storage cluster with about 130 TByte capacity to expand the existing 50 TByte Lustre file system, which is the common background storage of the Linux cluster systems at the LRZ.

“The broadly enhanced capacity of our Cluster infrastructure will go a long way in reducing the waiting times for our campus users, and will complement the capability provided by our national supercomputing system HLRB-II, a 9728 core SGI Altix 4700”, says Dr. Matthias Brehm, Group Leader for HPC at LRZ. “All possible resource requirements can now be satisfied by suitable choice of one of our systems within the computing pyramid, ranging from the desktop up to the high-end system.”

LRZ:
The Leibniz Supercomputing Centre provides general IT services to the scientific and academic communities in Munich and Bavaria, a powerful communications infrastructure called the Munich Scientific Network and a technical and scientific high performance Supercomputing Centre for all German universities. It is Member of the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS), the alliance of the three German national supercomputing centres, which provides the most powerful high-performance computing infrastructure in Europe.

circular:
circular Informationssysteme GmbH is a vendor for server, storage and network infrastructure. In the HPC sector it works as reseller for SUN microsystem products in Germany.

MEGWARE:
MEGWARE Computer GmbH is a vendor of HPC clusters, which delivered hundreds of clusters in Europe, mainly in Germany. MEGWARE develops hardware components and management tools for clusters and is in close partnership with international manufacturers for HPC technology development.

SGI:
SGI, also known as Silicon Graphics, Inc., is a leader in high-performance computing, visualization and storage. SGI's vision is to provide technology that enables the most significant scientific and creative breakthroughs of the 21st century. Whether it's sharing images to aid in brain surgery, finding oil more efficiently, studying global climate, providing technologies for homeland security and defense or enabling the transition from analog to digital broadcasting, SGI is dedicated to addressing the next class of challenges for scientific, engineering and creative users. With offices worldwide, the company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif.