HPC System SuperMUC, installed at GCS centre Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) in Garching near Munich, has commenced the second part of its installation with a performance upgrade.
Nine months after its inauguration, an agreement was sealed for a planned system expansion to be completed by end of 2014 or early 2015. The upgrade of the LRZ supercomputer, SuperMUC, which currently delivers a peak performance of 3.185 petaflops and holds position 6 on the Top500 list, will boost the system’s performance by a factor of about 2.1, making it capable of 6.4 petaflops.
The contract for SuperMUC Phase II was signed by representatives of all parties involved: Arndt Bode of the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ), Karl-Heinz Hoffmann (chair of Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften), Martina Koederitz (general manager of IBM Germany), and Andreas Pflieger (IBM) in the presence of Wolfgang Heubisch and Georg Antretter representing the Bavarian State Ministry of Sciences, Research and the Arts.
The agreement states that 74,302 Intel-Xeon processor cores will be added to the existing 155,656 processor cores of SuperMUC. Its main memory will be expanded from 340 to 538 terabytes and 9 petabytes of intermediate storage will complement the system’s existing capacity of 10 petabytes.
The LRZ HPC system has been designed for exceptionally versatile deployment. The more than 150 different applications running on SuperMUC on average per year range from solving problems in physics and fluid dynamics to a wealth of other scientific fields, such as aerospace and automotive engineering, medicine and bioinformatics, astrophysics and geophysics amongst others.
Professor Bode is confident that SuperMUC Phase II will be running as stably and reliably as the current system has done from day one – and that it will scale to the large number of cores.
'Only shortly after starting operation, SuperMUC was working to full capacity. Already, there are applications that practically use the entire system, and they do this in a very efficient way. Especially in the realm of biology and life sciences, we expect a significantly higher demand of system performance in the foreseeable future. SuperMUC Phase II will be in an excellent position to meet these requirements,' said Bode.
