SuperMUC

SuperMUC

Operators	Leibniz-Rechenzentrum
Location	Garching, Germany
Architecture	19,252 Intel Xeon CPUs
Operating system	SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Memory	340  TB
Storage	15  PB
Speed	2.90 petaFLOPS
Ranking	TOP500 : #44, November 2017
Website	www.lrz.de/services/compute/supermuc/

SuperMUC was a supercomputer of the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. It was housed in the LRZ's data centre in Garching near Munich. It was decommissioned in January 2020, having been superseded by the more powerful SuperMUC-NG.

History

LRZ 'twin cube', housing SuperMUC

SuperMUC

SuperMUC (the suffix 'MUC' alludes to the IATA code of Munich's airport) is operated by the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, a European centre for supercomputing. In order to house its hardware, the infrastructure space of the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre was more than doubled in 2012. SuperMUC was the fastest European supercomputer when it entered operation in the summer of 2012 ^[1] and in 2015 was ranked No. 20 in the Top500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers. ^[2] SuperMUC serves European researchers of many fields, including medicine, astrophysics, quantum chromodynamics, computational fluid dynamics, computational chemistry, life sciences, genome analysis and earth quake simulations.

Performance

SuperMUC is an IBM iDataPlex system containing 19,252 Intel Xeon Sandy Bridge-EP and Westmere-EX multi-core processors (155,656 cores), for a peak performance of about 3  PFLOPS (3 × 10¹⁵ FLOPS). It has 340  TB of main memory and 15  PB of hard disk space. It uses a new form of cooling that IBM developed, called Aquasar, that uses hot water to cool the processors. IBM claims that this design saves 40 percent of the energy normally needed to cool a comparable system. ^{[3] [4]}

SuperMUC is connected to powerful visualization systems, which consist of a large 4K stereoscopic powerwall as well as a five-sided CAVE artificial virtual reality environment.

SuperMUC-NG

SuperMUC-NG is the successor system operated by the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) in Garching, Germany, and has been deployed in two phases that complement each other. Phase 1, launched in 2019, consists of 6,480 CPU-only nodes based on Intel Xeon Platinum 8174 processors, providing more than 311,000 compute cores, around 720 TB of main memory and a peak performance of about 26.9 petaflops for large-scale simulations in fields such as astrophysics, climate research and fluid dynamics. Phase 2, installed from 2023 and in regular user operation since mid-2025, adds a separate GPU-accelerated cluster using Lenovo SD650-I V3 nodes with Intel Sapphire Rapids CPUs and Intel Data Center GPU Max accelerators, reaching roughly 28 petaflops peak and targeting AI-driven workloads and GPU-accelerated HPC applications while Phase 1 continues to serve primarily CPU-based simulations. ^[5]

References

1. "Top 500 list June 2012". TOP500.org. Retrieved 2014-12-12.
2. "Top 500 list June 2015". TOP500.org. Retrieved 2024-05-19.
3. "IBM builds 3 petaflop computer for Germany - SuperMUC could be world's fastest system". Pcadvisor.co.uk. 2012-09-05. Retrieved 2012-09-12.
4. "IBM Newsroom - 2010-12-13 Leibniz-Rechenzentrum entscheidet sich für neuen IBM Supercomputer mit Intel® Xeon® Prozessoren der nächsten Generation für anspruchsvolle Forschungsanwendungen - Deutschland". 03.ibm.com. 2010-12-13. Archived from the original on December 18, 2010. Retrieved 2012-09-12.
5. "SuperMUC-NG". doku.lrz.de.

External links

• "System description of SuperMUC at the LRZ website"
• Rechnen und Heizen: Neuer Supercomputer für Garching bei br-online.de, 13. Dezember 2010
• "PRACE Announces 'SuperMUC' System for LRZ"

48°15′42″N11°40′00″E / 48.2617°N 11.6667°E / 48.2617; 11.6667