New magnitUDE Supercomputer

Planning began in 2012 to expand the HPC capacities at the UDE, made necessary by the heavy workload of the Cray XT6m supercomputer and growing demand due to new appointments and research projects. After a lengthy search for a location, a research facility funding application was submitted under Professors Kempf and Schröder in February 2014 for investment in the new supercomputer. In March 2015 the UDE received approval from the DFG and the state government. In the subsequent tender, a test matrix based on the requirements of the user groups was used to find the best possible solution for the UDE. The winner of the tender was announced in November 2015, and NEC installed the new magnitUDE supercomputer at the beginning of 2016. It initially had over 564 compute nodes with a total of 13,536 processor cores, over 40,704 GB of main memory and fast communication with Intel OmniPath architecture; it is connected to 480 TB of space on a parallel storage system, so that multiple nodes can access the shared memory simultaneously. The system has energy-saving water cooling in the rear doors and consumes a maximum of 200 kW of electricity. It is installed in a total of ten server cabinets. Benchmarks showed that the supercomputer occupied a very respectable 279th place in the worldwide TOP 500 list as of June 2016. Given the speed at which HPC is advancing, however, it has now already been nosed out of the list. For the UDE’s purposes, a permanent place on the list is not essential, however, and it suffices for a machine to be in the middle of the list when it is first commissioned. At the beginning of 2017 magnitUDE was upgraded with funds from the Faculty of Physics to just under 15,000 processor cores.