New HPC cluster successfully installed at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg

Last October, following a call for bids, MEGWARE GmbH was awarded the contract for the procurement of a new HPC cluster at the Martin Luther University of Halle (MLU), which has now been successfully handed over to the university’s IT Service Center.

The high performance computer consists of 250 compute nodes, each with two Intel Xeon Haswell E5-2680v3 processors. The housings enable the integration of 12 hot swap-compliant computing nodes and are equipped with a redundant power supply featuring 80 PLUS Platinum certified power supply units. Two further compute nodes – each with 1 TB of main memory – were also implemented. Each of these compute nodes uses four Intel Xeon E5-4620v3 processors.
In addition to the compute nodes, the HPC system also features twelve GPGPU nodes, each containing four performant, actively cooled Maxwell™ architecture-based NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards. The nodes and servers are networked using powerful InfiniBand technology. Together with the parallel file system GPFS, the global hard disk system (with a net capacity of 1,024 TB) is provided homogeneously for the entire HPC cluster.

Among other tasks, the supercomputer is to be used for next-generation sequencing (NGS) in the life sciences sector. The analysis of raw NGS data requires extremely high computing power and storage capacities, since very large volumes of data are generated and stored. The MLU Halle’s IT Service Center now boasts some 550 processors, with over 46 TB of main memory, for processing and interpreting such data.