SuperMUC at LRZ
Photo: Andreas Heddergott
On Monday, the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) celebrated the expansion of their SuperMUC cluster. Now in production mode, the 6.8 Petaflop “Phase 2” supercomputer is powered by over 241,000 Intel processor cores.
SuperMUC strengthens the position of Germany’s Gauss Centre for Supercomputing in Europe by delivering outstanding compute power and integrating it into the European High Performance Computing ecosystem. With the operation of SuperMUC, LRZ will act as a European Centre for Supercomputing and will be a Tier-0 centre for PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe. SuperMUC is available to all European researchers to expand the frontiers of science and engineering.
Energy Efficient Supercomputing
SuperMUC is one of the most energy efficient supercomputers in the world. Using proven hot water cooling technology from IBM, SuperMUC circulates 45 degree centigrade warm water over active system components to eliminate the need for water chillers.
Energy efficiency is a key component of today’s computing devices – from smart phones to supercomputers,“ explains Arndt Bode, Chairman of the LRZ. “With Phase 2 of SuperMUC, LRZ continues to act as a pioneer in this field as we deliver proof that it is possible to significantly lower the energy consumption in datacenters, thus drastically reduce the operating costs.”
Enabling Big Science
Like SuperMUC Phase 1, the LRZ system expansion has been designed for versatility. More than 150 different applications run on SuperMUC on average per year, solving problems for scientific fields such as aerospace and automotive engineering, medicine and bioinformatics, astrophysics and geophysics, amongst others. The results of the first two years of research supported by SuperMUC are available as a report.
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