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The University of Tübingen awards MEGWARE the contract for supply of the new bwFor high performance computer “BinAC”

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As part of the bwHPC initiative of the state of Baden-Württemberg for tenders for the supply of HPC to Tier 3 higher education institutions, the BinAC cluster contract was awarded to MEGWARE. The new BinAC system is based on one of the first binary computers from 1949 and is intended for use in the fields of bioinformatics and astrophysics, from which problems are to be processed on this cluster. The applications of bioinformatics range from machine learning and molecular dynamics through next-generation sequencing (NGS).

 

The astrophysicists study planetary system formation and the development of massive protostars and conduct theoretical and numerical studies on sources of gravity waves, whereby questions regarding the stability of neutron stars and black holes are of particular interest.

 

Dr. Werner Dilling, Head of the Central Systems working group at the University of Tübingen: “When previously collaborating with MEGWARE, our contact partner stood out for its cluster planning expertise. The company’s wealth of experience in installing high performance computers was reflected in the technical design and, in addition to commercial factors, was the decisive factor for awarding it the contact.”

 

The new HPC cluster has over 300 computing nodes, with a total of 8,328 cores and 38 TB of main memory. Of these nodes, 236 are two socket systems with Intel Xeon E5-2680 v4 (Broadwell) processors. A further 60 dual socket systems in addition have 120 K80 graphics cards from NVIDIA, which boast a total of 2,880 GB GDDR5 in memory. Four machines perform calculations with a high main memory requirement and are based on four socket systems with 1 TB RAM. Users of the cluster will have 720 TB space available on the parallel file system BeeGFS.

 

“MEGWARE is delighted to be commissioned with realizing another implementation as part of the bwHPC project. In particular, the challenge of applying graphics accelerators and the resulting significantly improved performance will prove a key unique selling point of the new high performance computer,” said Jörg Heydemüller, HPC representative from MEGWARE.

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