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News Archive

November 2008

Press report: Neuer Superrechner für Hamburg; On the occassion of its 20th anniversary DKRZ invests 60 Millionen Euro for new facilities and a new high performance computer system.

February 2005

First IPCC AR4 smulations finished


The new facilities and the new high performance computer system at DKRZ

DKRZ invests 60 million Euro for new facilities and a new high performance computer system. Further information is found at the press report from the 9th November 2007.

The new facility:

The construction works of the new DKRZ building, which are funded with 26 million Euro by the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, have started in winter 2007/08. The new high performance computing system (HLRE2) was installed in the new building in February/March 2009. The regular computing service for our users has started in April 2009. As scheduled the staff of DKRZ and M&D will move into the new offices in fall 2009. Detailed information here…

The new computing system:

The new supercomputer an IBM Power6 system, will exceed the capacity of the existing system approximately 60 times. With a peak performance of 158 Teraflop/s (158 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. Detailed information here ....

 

 


A Supercomputer for Hamburg

At its 20th 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 20th 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 11th 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 2nd climate research summit in Berlin at 16th 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

IPCC AR4 Simulations

First Results of the simulations and further information

Press release of MPI-M, DKRZ and the Model and Data group (M&D) (15.02.2005):

First model simulations for the new IPCC-Report completed

The first model simulations for the fourth IPCC Report, scheduled for early 2007, have been successfully completed by scientists from Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M) and the Group "Model and Data" at the German Climate Computing Centre (DKRZ).

In this Assessment Report (AR4) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC (see also www.ipcc.ch), the actual knowledge on the state and the expected change of climate is summarised.

The simulations realised with a new climate model developed at MPI-M can be characterised as follows:

All simulations were done on the HLRE - the High Performance Computing System for Earth System Research - at DKRZ. About a quarter of the total resources were necessary in the last year to complete the simulations.

The model output is stored in a relational database and is available to German scientists for analysis. The data are available from World Data Centre for Climate (WDCC) and can be accessed on http://ipcc.wdc-climate.de.

First results of the simulations can be seen as figures and animations at the DKRZ: http://www.dkrz.de/dkrz/science/IPCC_AR4. They show simulated changes of the air temperature as well as the temporal development of sea ice and snow cover.

The new simulations show a mean global warming between 2.5 and 4.1 degrees Celsius until the end of this century (compared with the mean temperature between 1961-1990) - dependent on the amount of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere. The seasonally varying sea ice area decreases between 30 and 50%. One of the consequences of global warming could be a total melting of Arctic sea-ice in late summer at the end of this century.
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Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum GmbH | Impressum