High-Performance Computing trend in Germany

Munich, 17 November 97 At an October meeting in Munich, the Supercomputing Working Group of ZKI (the German Centres for Communication and Information) discussed the present status and new trends in High-Performance Computing in Germany. In 1995 the Board of the German Science Council presented a report in which they found that Germany was falling behind the other countries with respect to high performance computing. The council recommended to form two to four German national centers with machines ranking in the first top 20 of the Top 500 list. Four computing centers reported on the progress so far.

Leibniz Rechenzentrum (LRZ) in Munich
The Leibnitz Rechenzentrum has a Cray T90 with4 processors, an IBM SP2 with 77 processors and a Siemens-Nixdorf/Fujitsu VPP700 with 34 processors. By the end of this year, the Bavarian VPP will be upgraded to 52 processors, 104 GByte distributed memory and 1 TByte disc space. In the November 1997 Top500 list, LRZ is now number 39 with its VPP, 71.2 GFlop/s, and number 275 with its IMB SP2, 14.7 GFlop/s. LRZ can be found at www.lrz.de. The University of Erlangen will acquire as their local machine a 6 processor VPP that is compatible with the central system in Munich. As the VPP and the other computers are only for use in Bavaria, there are plans for a German Supercomputer Centre in Munich too. There are major requirements in computing time and power. LRZ analysed a questionaire and found projects with a total need of about 140 000 CPU-hours if a machine with 1 TFlop/s effectively were installed.

Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum (ZIB) in Berlin
At ZIB the SGI/Cray T3E-900 has a total of 163 processing elements with 128 MB and 8 with 256 MB memory. The machine is accepted and the move from the Cray T3D to the T3E was simple and done within one month. The Cray T3D is still working and has 256 processing elements, the Cray YMP 4 CPUs, 512 MB, and the Cray J932/16 with 16 CPUs and 8 GByte memory. Now ZIB has two machines in the Top500 list, ranks 37 with 82.3 GFlop/s and 133 and 25.3 GFlop/s.

The Institute for Plasma physics (MPI) in Garching, Max-Planck-Gesellschaft
MPI has just added 160 processors to its Cray T3E 512 to a total of 672. Although MPI uses the 600 MFlop processor, they now are number1 in Germanyand rank 8 in the Top500 list with 196.1 GFlop/s. The computer centre in Garching is demonstrating an application at the IEEE SC in the US, the simulation is done in Garching and then transferred online to San Jose and visualised via Stuttgart and the B-WIN.

HLR North (HPC-Center)
This centre is still in the planning stage. The participation of partners is very dynamic. At present the following 6 German counties are members in the working group: Berlin, Bremen, Hamburg, Lower Saxony (Niedersachsen), Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Schleswig-Holstein. Sachsen-Anhalt and Vorpommern have been members but are not active now. It was decided to have three components in the configuration:

  1. massively parallel system
  2. vector-parallel system
  3. visualisation concept
The MPP-system will be installed in Berlin, the rest in Hannover with an extremely high-speed network connection between these locations. The project will be financed in the usual way: 50% by HBFG - the Federal Republic, the rest by the counties. The operational costs will be paid by Berlin and Lower Saxony - where the machines are installed. All counties in Germany can use this machine - but there are still a lot of questions open, which projects are allowed and how to select them, who has to pay etc. If there are no difficulties in the further process, the project can be completed at the end of 1998/beginning of 1999. But there are a lot of constraints, thus the timing is difficult.

Uwe Harms