MEGWARE awarded contract to deliver a new high performance computer to Braunschweig University of Technology
Chemnitz, 02/11/2016 – MEGWARE
The new cluster at Braunschweig University of Technology was commissioned by ten institutes across three faculties, coordinated by the Institute for Computational Modelling in Civil Engineering (iRMB), through the DFG (German Research Association) scheme for major instrumentation. The new system will represent a substantial improvement to the University’s infrastructure for research projects in the field of computational sciences and engineering (CSE). A major use of the new machines will be for demanding simulations, sometimes with many billions of degrees of freedom, in the fields of structural and fluid mechanics, thermodynamics, energy technologies, acoustics and pharmaceutical chemistry.
“The existing HPC system in the Faculty of Architecture, Civil Engineering and Environmental Sciences, which dates from 2010 and has a peak performance of 100 teraflops including the GPU computing nodes, will now be replaced, and we are delighted that MEGWARE has been awarded the contract following a Europe-wide tender. We expect to see particularly high performance increases through the integration of fast Nvidia GTX graphics cards within special visualisation nodes and 8 additional GPGPU computing nodes with a total of 32 of the latest-generation Tesla P100 Nvidia GPUs, and the fast internal NVLink communication system,” says Professor Krafczyk from Braunschweig University.
The HPC team at MEGWARE will install 2 of the new Intel Xeon Broadwell E5-2640v4, 2.4 GHz processors in each of more than 300 computing nodes, along with a 64 GB main memory expansion in the University’s data centre. All of the nodes will be interconnected by the latest high-speed Intel Omni-Path architecture. The complex Omni-Path fabric is modular, with flexible cabling and corresponding switch levels to interconnect all of the components in the system. The additional administration, access, visualisation and GPGPU-nodes will be homogeneous with the computing nodes in the architecture and will be integrated into 9 racks with an additional 640 TB gross storage system based on a BeeGFS file system.
“MEGWARE will be installing a highly-efficient HPC system at the Braunschweig site that will be unrivalled in the region, and this will dramatically accelerate the fundamental research being carried out in the field of computational engineering there. We will maintain the system for at least 5 years and support the administration and monitoring processes with ClustWare, our latest management software,” explains Michael Weber, HPC Solution Manager at MEGWARE.
The new high performance computing system with a budget totalling 1.7 million euros will be available to users from the first quarter of 2017, and will both enable the implementation of a variety of joint projects with the DFG, BMBF (German Federal Ministry of Education and Research) and EU at Braunschweig, and provide a foundation for new research initiatives.