Black Forest Grid

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Black Forest Grid Initiative logo
The data center

The Black Forest Grid Initiative (BFG) at the University of Freiburg was launched in 2005 to meet the steadily growing demand for computer resources for scientific computing from various areas of the university and its environment. The idea behind the initiative followed a pragmatic bottom-up approach . By pooling the most uniform resources possible from a large number of participating institutions, better utilization and less personnel-intensive maintenance of the operating resources are made possible.

Since 2015/2016, university users in Baden-Württemberg have had access to computer clusters financed by the state ( bwHPC ) at seven locations, which arose from the former bwGRiD . Their hardware and software equipment is adapted as closely as possible to the needs of special research focuses. Therefore there was no longer any need for the research groups to (partially) finance their own clusters themselves.

From an organizational point of view, the BFG cluster is essentially a Tier 2 site of the ATLAS project at the Large Hadron Collider and part of the LCG and is also integrated into the Gauß Alliance (NGI-DE) and EGI . The VOs atlas, ilc, ghep, dech, dteam and ops as well as local users are supported

  • the ATLAS groups of the University of Freiburg,
  • Theoretical Solid State Physics of the Physikalisches Institut
  • of the computer center of the University of Freiburg

ATLASbfg computer cluster

The cluster has currently (10/2019) over 3432 Xeon - processor cores . As a storage stand over nfs over beegfs 512 TB and 20 TB, dCache 2.2 PB available. The operating system, CentOS 7.6, is loaded with the help of OpenSLX and the distributed network block device dnbd3 diskless . The batch queues are accessible both via the GRID middleware UMD and directly via the resource manager Slurm . This creates a hybrid model that combines grid computing (tier 2) with traditional cluster computing for local users (tier 3).

Web links

Coordinates: 48 ° 0 '12.3 "  N , 7 ° 50' 53.8"  E