Munich, Paris – January 13 2022 – Atos today announces that it has been awarded a contract to install a new supercomputing cluster at Technische Universität Dresden (TU) in Germany. The supercomputer will be used for data intensive HPC tasks and data analysis at the Center for Information Services and High-Performance Computing (ZIH). Based on Atos’ BullSequana XH2000 architecture, researchers at TU Dresden will use the new supercomputer for computational tasks in environmental research, life sciences, materials sciences and engineering, as well as for basic research in physics, chemistry and mathematics. It is scheduled to start operations in autumn 2022.
“We are pleased to continue to support TU Dresden with HPC expertise via our BullSequana XH2000 installation and to continue to enable cutting-edge research. The new system is extremely energy efficient thanks to our patented and world leading warm water cooling solution,” says Dr. Martin Matzke, Senior Vice President Big Data & Security at Atos Central Europe.
“In addition to the innovative hot water cooling, which will lead to an encouraging increase in the energy efficiency of the system, the balanced architecture and the exceptionally powerful infrastructure for the fast input/output of data are to be highlighted, which sustainably advance important research fields of ours such as modeling, simulation, and data analytics,” explains Prof. Dr. Wolfgang E. Nagel, TU Dresden/ZIH.
The new supercomputer features Atos’ water-cooled patented Direct Liquid Cooling (DLC) solution, which uses 35°C warm water to cool the system. This feature enables TU Dresden to minimize the energy consumption of the cooling and at the same time benefit from processors with the highest compute performance. The lost heat from the BullSequana XH2000 systems will be used to heat surrounding buildings and thus has a positive contribution towards the ecological sustainability on TU Dresden’s campus.
This new HPC installation includes more than 600 nodes of Intel’s upcoming CPU generation “Sapphire Rapids” with large main memory and high memory bandwidth. TU Dresden will thus be able to perform high-quality data analyses and simulations in a timely and flexible manner.
Atos and TU Dresden have been working together since 2013 when Atos delivered and installed the “Taurus” HPC system at ZIH and then the expansion of the system in 2015, whose energy efficiency has also been the subject of scientific research. The new HPC system will replace the Taurus.