The universities of Heidelberg and Mannheim award MEGWARE the contract for an HPC cluster

The compute cluster at the sites operated by the University of Heidelberg (University Data Centre URZ and the Interdisciplinary Centre for Scientific Computing IWR) and the University of Mannheim (University Data Centre Mannheim RUM) will be used to engage in the research focuses in the area of life sciences, economics, social sciences, and in the development of methods and algorithms for scientific computing.

The system architecture will be implemented using x86_64 compute nodes with a variety of specifications together with an Infiniband network used to communicate between the compute nodes and other elements of the operational infrastructure. The latest MEGWARE cluster consists of over 600 nodes. The new Intel Xeon architecture with Haswell processors – which provide approximately 10,000 cores for the data centres – will be used as the basis for the high-performance compute nodes. The expected processing capacity ranges at 384 teraFLOPS theoretical CPU peak performance. The lion’s share of the nodes are fitted with a E5-2630v3 type processor, which comes with eight physical cores and a base clock speed of 2.4 GHz as well as support for 1866 MHz memory clock. The high-quality features of the GPU server chassis provides ideal conditions for stable system operations.