BERLIN, Germany, Nov. 24 — The Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS) further strengthened its position as a global player in High-Performance Computing (HPC). With it’s latest HPC-System, the recently installed supercomputer Hornet of the High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS), making its debut in the TOP500 list of November 2014 as new number 16, GCS now has all its three HPC-systems positioned in the top-20 of the most powerful supercomputers world wide. Delivering a performance of 5.00 PetaFlops on the Linpack benchmark (Rmax), supercomputer JUQUEEN of GCS member centre Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) defended position 8 in the TOP500 while HPC-system SuperMUC of the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) Garching/Munich (Rmax 2.90 PetaFlops) is now registered on the 14th place. Supercomputer Hornet (HLRS) follows closely with its Linpack performance of 2.76 PetaFlops.
The three GCS HPC-systems making it into the top-20 of the 44th edition of the TOP500 list (Nov. 2014) underscores once again Germany’s claim to be a leading global player in High Performance Computing. Only the USA, represented in the top-20 with ten supercomputing sites, outnumbers Germany. The world’s undisputed No. 1 system remains China’s Tianhe-2, a supercomputer developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology. For the fourth time in succession, Tianhe-2 has retained its leading position in the TOP500 list with its performance of 33.86 PetaFlops (quadrillions of calculations per second) on the Linpack benchmark.
“The rankings in the TOP500 demonstrate unmistakably that Germany is a leading nation in terms of supercomputing. It is GCS’s mission to provide our users with first-class computing resources, and with the addition of Hornet to our national trio of HPC installations, we continue to provide the by far most powerful HPC infrastructure in all of Europe,” states Dr. Claus Axel Müller, Managing Director of GCS, who furthermore points out that the GCS resources will soon see an additional boost with the planned expansion of LRZ’s HPC system SuperMUC in early 2015.
“Our concept clearly bears fruit: By offering three national HPC infrastructures of complementary system architecture and design, Germany is in the unique position to optimally respond to the technical requirements of scientists and researchers in their pursuit of breakthrough discoveries using HPC tools. There are no signs of a slowdown in users’ demand for HPC power—the number of applications for large-scale computing projects and the volume of the individual requests keep going up,” explains Dr. Müller. This ever-growing demand for computing time is e.g. reflected in the results of GCS’s most recent Call for Large-Scale Projects. For the 12th call, GCS received requests for over 1.5 billion computing core hours but was able to accommodate only two thirds of it, primarily due to lack of resources.
About GCS
The Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS) combines the three national supercom- puting centres HLRS (High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart), JSC (Jülich Supercomputing Centre), and LRZ (Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, Garching near Munich) into Germany’s Tier-0 supercomputing institution. Concertedly, the three centres provide the largest and most powerful supercomputing infrastructure in all of Europe to serve a wide range of industrial and research activities in various disciplines. They also provide top-class training and education for the national as well as the European High Performance Computing (HPC) community. GCS is the German member of PRACE (Partnership for Advance Computing in Europe), an international non-profit association consisting of 25 member countries, whose representative organizations create a pan-European supercomputing infrastructure, providing access to computing and data management resources and services for large-scale scientific and engineering applications at the highest performance level.
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Source: Gauss Centre for Supercomputing