SuperMUC

HLRB II building (left) and SuperMUC (right), June 2011

SuperMUC is a supercomputer that is operated at the Leibniz data center in Garching near Munich . The ending "MUC" refers to the IATA airport code of Munich airport . The computer is the successor to the high-performance computer Bayern II (HLRB II).

history

For the construction of SuperMUC , the Leibniz data center was expanded to become the European Center for Supercomputing. The cube-shaped computer building was roughly doubled. The costs for this should be around 85 million euros for the first expansion stage and 49 million euros for the second. In addition, a visualization laboratory is planned between the current LRZ building and the Faculty of Mathematics / Computer Science at the Technical University of Munich . The total costs will amount to around 135 million euros and will be borne by the federal government and the Free State of Bavaria. On December 13, 2010 it was announced that IBM had taken over the construction of the SuperMUC. Construction was completed in spring 2011 and commissioning began at the end of 2011. The computer has been fully operational since July 2012.

The official inauguration followed on July 20, 2012 by the Federal Minister for Education and Research Annette Schavan ( CDU ) and the Bavarian State Minister for Science, Research and Art Wolfgang Heubisch ( FDP ).

In 2015, another, roughly equally powerful supercomputer was created (phase 2). Both are independent systems, but are loosely coupled via the file system.

In October 2018, the successor SuperMUC-NG went into operation, which, with a theoretical peak performance (RPeak) of 26.9 petaflops as of June 2019, is number nine among the world's most powerful computers.

On January 2, 2020, SuperMUC (phase 2) was shut down.

technology

SuperMUC

SuperMUC at the LRZ

The SuperMUC is equipped with 18,432 Intel - Xeon -E5-2680- CPUs (8 cores , 2.7 GHz) and 820 Intel Xeon E7-4870 CPUs (10 cores, 2.4 GHz), a memory of 340 terabytes (= 10 ¹² bytes; TB ), 4 petabytes (= 10 ¹⁵ bytes; PB ) permanent NAS disk storage (> 3,400 SATA HDDs, 2 TB each, double-parity RAID ), 10 PB temporary GPFS disk storage, and a tape storage system of more than 30 PB. It is cooled by an Aquasar cooling system. The peak computing power is 3.19 PetaFLOPS (= 10 ¹⁵ Floating Point Operations Per Second ).

Like most supercomputers now, SuperMUC also uses a Linux distribution (here SUSE Linux Enterprise Server ) as the operating system.

At the time of its inauguration in June 2012 at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, the SuperMUC was named as the fastest supercomputer in Europe.

In June 2016 it was ranked 27th worldwide in the TOP500 list, 44th in November 2017 and 57th in June 2018.

SuperMUC NG

The SuperMUC NG is equipped with 6,480 Xeon Platinum 8174 24C 3.1GHz CPUs with 48 cores each connected to an Intel Omni-Path Interconnect. The Linpack performance is 19.4766 PFLOPS, the theoretical peak performance is 26.8739 PFLOPS. The main memory of the cluster is 719 Tbytes. The high performance parallel file system has 50 PB storage capacity at 500 GB / s access speed, the data science storage 20 PB at 70 GB / s. The operating system comes from Suse Linux (SLES), the batch scheduling system is the SLURM, the high performance parallel file system is the IBM Spectrum Scale (GPFS).

This means that it never takes 10th place on the TOP500 list of the world's best computers. It is the third fastest in Europe (after the Hawk at the high-performance computing center in Stuttgart and the Piz Daint in Switzerland).