The agreement was signed by Hamburg’s First Mayor Olaf Scholz , the President of the Helmholtz Association Prof. Dr. Dr. Otmar D. Wiestler, and the President of the Max Planck Society Prof. Dr. Martin Stratmann.
Today German officials signed a contract for the long-term financing of a new supercomputer for DKRZ. The new machine will be used for climate research.
We need to understand much better how climate changes influence our way of life and vice versa – locally and globally,” said Katharina Fegebank, Senator for Science, Research and Equality. “This interplay is highly complex. Wise solutions are therefore dependent on sound scientific knowledge.”
The German Climate Center (DKRZ) is a national service facility for climate and earth system research. Its current high-performance calculator HLRE-3 “Mistral” has more than one hundred thousand processor cores and a top performance of 3.6 PetaFLOPS. With his help, model-based simulations of global climate change and its regional effects are investigated. At the DKRZ, for example, the influence of air pollution on human health is investigated or the extent to which climatic changes have been made by humans.
The objective of the DKRZ Agreement is to ensure the scientifically required regular renewals of the high-performance computer and to lead the DKRZ into the future as a central service facility for German climate research. An extensive assessment procedure will continue to ensure that the nature and scope of the procurement are in line with the scientific objectives as well as with the actual equipment requirements at the DKRZ.
Mistral Supercomputer at DKRZ
The agreement allows the DKRZ to push ahead with the acquisition of the computer and storage infrastructure and to provide the scientists with the new infrastructure for innovative research questions starting in 2020,” said Prof. Dr. Thomas Ludwig, Managing Director of the German Climate Center.
