This week, the new “Hawk” supercomputer was inaugurated in a ceremony at the High-Performance Computing Center of the University of Stuttgart (HLRS). Officials, scientists and other stakeholders celebrated the new system, which is among the fastest in Europe and the world.

Hawk, an HPE Apollo 9000 system, is equipped with 5,632 nodes–each with two AMD Epyc Rome 7742 CPUs–housed inside 44 cabinets. The system sports a total memory of 1.44 petabytes, Mellanox InfiniBand HDR200 interconnection, and 25 petabytes of disk storage, supplied by DDN. Under normal operations, HLRS reports a typical power envelope of 3.5 MW for Hawk, rising to about 4.1 MW while running Linpack.

With a peak performance of 26 petaflops, the new supercomputer is 3.5 times more powerful than the “Hazel Hen” system that it is replacing. Installed in late 2014, Hazel Hen ranks at number 35 on the current Top500 list with 5.6 Linpack petaflops. Hawk is undergoing testing ahead of acceptance and production but it will likely appear within the top 20 of the next list, due out in June. Funding for Hawk totaling €76 million (~$82 million) was jointly provided by the Baden-Württemberg Ministry for Science, Research and Art and the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research.

“Hawk expands the University of Stuttgart’s already excellent research infrastructure with an additional flagship system,” said Wolfram Ressel, rector of the University of Stuttgart. “It will enable cutting edge academic and industrial research in a wide range of contexts where simulation and big data play important roles. In this way the new high-performance computer also makes an important contribution to realizing the University of Stuttgart’s vision, Intelligent systems for a sustainable society.” 

Hawk is also the beginning of a supercomputing collaboration between HLRS and HPE. Through this partnership, the two will develop new software and tools for HPC, AI, optimization and other applications in preparation for the exascale era. Heiko Meyer, HPE’s chief sales officer, said the company is looking forward to “a long-term development partnership with HLRS in which we optimize applications, test future technologies, and bring them to a mature, market-ready state.”

In terms of applications, HLRS emphasized sustainability fields, ranging from optimizing wind turbines and power plants to improving the aerodynamics of aircrafts and automobiles. 

“Hawk allows us to better understand the environment, and use these new technologies more effectively,” said Michael Resch, director of HLRS. “We want to give every citizen an opportunity to be a part of these changes. With Hawk, we can digitalize the future in a sustainable way.”

Beyond supporting a wide range of open science goals, up to 10 percent of Hawk’s cycles will be available for private industry in Germany. 

Read more about Hawk’s inauguration here.

Read more about technical specifications here.