23.07.2008
Heidelberg supercomputer among the fastest worldwide
URZ manager Michael Hebgen and bwGRiD project participant Torsten Rathmann working with the new supercomputer
(Copyright: Klaus Kirchner, University of Heidelberg Computing Centre)
The old adage “true beauty comes from within” comes to mind when looking at Heidelberg’s new supercomputer. It’s not necessarily an alluring sight – being black, boxy and weighing over two tonnes – but it’s the inner values that count, and they are nothing to sneeze at. With ten tightly-packed blade centres with 14 processor nodes each, the high-performance cluster in the
University of Heidelberg Computing Centre (URZ) is Number 403 among the world’s fastest computers. That was confirmed by the Top 500 Supercomputer ranking, which publishes the latest evaluations twice a year at
http://top500.org.
The Heidelberg supercomputer is currently still in its test phase. The parallel computer is a part of the bwGRiD initiative, a Baden-Württemberg-based research project managed by the High Performance Computing Centre Stuttgart (HLRS). The cluster hardware was financed by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the state of Baden-Württemberg, which is also bearing the personnel and infrastructure costs.
Every university in Baden-Württemberg is involved in the bwGRiD project, which is setting up a regional high-performance grid for projects such as extensive modelling work that require exceptional processing power. The basic idea of grid computing is to link computers at a number of locations and provide access to them individually or in parallel. In future, bwGRiD will permit scientists to submit their processing jobs without needing to search for a data centre capable of handling them. The interactive pool of computing power is thus a decisive step into the future of information technology designed to meet the enormous growth in processing requirements of the scientific and research communities.
More:
http://top500.orghttp://www.urz.uni-heidelberg.de/server/grid/http://www.bw-grid.de/
