News from HLRN - High-Performance Computer North - a Hanover viewHanover 29 January 2001 RRZN (Regional Computer Center of Lower Saxony - Regionales Rechenzentrum fuer Niedersachsen), Hanover, disclosed some details of the joint HPC project of the six northern German States. Further they discussed the future of the existing supercomputers and the application areas.
The Ministry of Science and Culture announced in January that the cabinet of Lower Saxony agreed the funding of the High-Performance Computing of the six states in Northern Germany. This improves the existing regional science infrastructure by installation and operation of the northern computer connection. This joint task will be done by the states Berlin, Bremen, Hamburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Schleswig-Holstein, the state Brandenburg plans to join this team within a short timeframe. In Berlin and Niedersachsen a computer worth 20 Million DM (10 Mio. Euro) each will be installed at Konrad-Zuse-Centre (ZIB) and RRZN. Both institutions will operate the computers which a connected via a direct line. The have a peak performance of 2 TeraFlop/s each. Lower Saxony will invest 7.8 Million DM (3.9 Mio. Euro) for the Hanoveranian machine, the other states add 2.2 Mio DM (1.1 Mio Euro) in total. The Federal Republik will pay the rest of 10 Mio. DM, which is caused by the Hochschulbaufoerderungsgesetz (law for funding buildings and investments in the universities). The states analysed the demand for such a system and developed a specific Northern Germany profile. Research activities lie in the science areas of ship building, coastal and sea research, biological waste water techniques, ozone and noise research as well as different engineering applications. In co-operation with ZIB, RRZN prepares the call for tender. It will be a clustered SMP system with high-end nodes (constellations). It is planned to go in operation with the new system by end of this year, 2001. The reason is to shut down the existing VPP300 and T3E systems as early as possible. The users of RRZN access an 'old' Fujitsu Siemens vector computer VPP300 with 4 processors. It will be the last vector computer at RRZN as officials said. New projects on this system have not been allowed for a longer time. RRZN tries together with the users to port the running programs on clustered systems, e.g. the Sun E10000, which has such an architecture. If this is not possible, RRZN tries to realise an access to other Fujitsu Systems still running in Karlsruhe and at LRZ in Munich - but details are still open. The Cray T3E at RRZN only has a small number of processors and was used for program development for the big Cray T3E at ZIB in Berlin and in projects that needed a small number of processors. As there are still big T3Es in Germany it might be possible to use them.
Uwe Harms [News on Advanced IT] [Calendar] [Analysis] [IT in Medicine] |
 |