08.10.2014

At its booth 603 DKRZ will give a preview on its forthcoming high performance computing system for earth system research HLRE-3 (Hochleistungsrechnersystem für die Erdsystemforschung 3, short: HLRE-3). In May DKRZ and Bull have signed a contract for the delivery of a petaflops-scale supercomputer for HLRE-3.

In spring 2015 the first configuration level of HLRE-3 will deliver six times the application performance compared to the current HLRE-II (Blizzard). In 2016, the final configuration of HLRE-3 will be completed with more than 60,000 processor cores on the basis of B700 DLC Blades distributed over 60 racks. It will achieve a peak performance of about 3 petaflops and the effective application performance will be 20 times higher than on the current computer. The corresponding Lustre-based storage component will in 2015 store up to 15 petabytes. In 2016 it will be extended to about 45 petabytes and then be one of the largest storage systems in the world.

In July Bull has installed a porting system based on Intel’s Haswell CPUs at DKRZ. The porting system consists of 20 nodes, each equipped with dual 12-core-CPUs (which offers a total of 480 cores), all together equipped with one terabyte main memory and a 300 terabytes Lustre-based parallel file system by Xyratex. The components are interconnected by FDR Infiniband technology. The system with a peak performance of about 20 teraflops - this corresponds to 1/6th of the performance of DKRZ’s current supercomputer Blizzard - offers the basis for porting the climate codes to the new architecture. An additional hybrid node equipped with an NVidia Tesla GPU allows for working on GPGPU developments as well as remote 3D visualization applications.