A Supercomputer for Hamburg

At its 20^th anniversary, the German Climate Computing Centre invests into new computing capacities

Twenty years ago, the German Climate Computing Centre (DKRZ) was founded. It provides computing resources to run numerical earth system models to simulate climate and climate change. At its 20^th anniversary, the institute receives funding of approximately 60 million euro for a new building and a new supercomputer system. Both will help to maintain the high quality of German climate research in the future.

On 11^th November 1987 the German Climate Computing Centre (DKRZ) in Hamburg was founded with the aim to enable research into the future developments of the climate and its impacts on the human environment. The national, non-profit service centre gives the German earth system research community the opportunity to simulate the climate not only qualitatively but also quantitatively.

Climate simulations make highest demands on computational resources. Modern supercomputers allow not only the simulations of mere physical processes such as flow dynamics, radiation balance, heat exchange and wind effect on the oceans, but also the evaluation of chemical and biological coupling mechanisms. These computer capacities are usually not available at research institutes and universities. Since its establishment, DKRZ provides the most modern high performance computing resources. Thus DKRZ contributed significantly to the worldwide leading position of German climate and earth system research.

"Without DKRZ’s supercomputers, data archives and user support we could not accomplish the necessary simulations of the global and increasingly also of the regional climate", says Jochem Marotzke, scientific director of the computing centre and director of the Max-Planck-Institute for Meteorology.

Financial support of 60 million euro

End of 2008 the DKRZ will move into a new building, which is funded with 26 million euro by the City of Hamburg. In addition a new high performance computer and a new data archive will be installed at the new facilities, being funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) with further 33.1 million euro.

The new supercomputer, an IBM Power6 system, will exceed the capacity of the existing system approximately 60 times. With a peak performance of more than 140 Teraflop/s (140 trillion floating point operations per second) the computer will belong to the world-wide largest supercomputers being used for scientific purposes.

On the one hand, this new acquisition allows computing projections of future climate in more detail, because more complex processes and interactions can be included in the models. On the other hand, the spatial resolution of the climate models will be enhanced. Thus also regional phenomena could be seized substantially more accurately than today.

The new facility constitutes an outstanding research infrastructure for model-based simulations of global climate change and its regional effects which fits the new High-Tech-Strategy for climate protection having been presented by the federal minister for education and research Annette Schavan at the 2^nd climate research summit in Berlin at 16^th October 2007.

The annual operation costs of the centre of six million euro will be borne by the shareholders of DKRZ. These are the Max-Planck-Society, the City of Hamburg being represented by the University of Hamburg, as well as Alfred-Wegener-Institute for Polar and Marin Research and the GKSS Geesthacht.

Information about High-Tech Strategy of BMBF at: http://www.bmbf.de/pub/hightech_strategie_fuer_klimaschutz.pdf

For further information please contact:

Dr. Joachim Biercamp
Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum GmbH
Tel. +49 40 460094-314
Fax +49 40 460094-270
http://www.dkrz.de
E-Mail: biercamp@dkrz.de

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