NEC Deutschland GmbH has delivered an LX series supercomputer to Technische Universität Kaiserslautern (TUK), one of Germany’s leading Universities of Technology. The system will be used for High Performance Computing applications from several scientific and engineering disciplines at TUK. Furthermore, member universities of the Alliance for High Performance Computing in Rhineland-Palatinate (AHRP) will also have access to the HPC system.

We are very happy to work together with NEC and jointly contribute to the research capacity of TUK as a whole. The level of NEC’s understanding of our requirements, the high sustained performance and stability of NEC’s HPC solution, as well as the dedication and technical competence of their team convinced us of their excellence,” said Professor Dr. Nicolas Gauger, Head of TUK’s Computing Center (RHRK) and Chair for Scientific Computing.

The new HPC cluster consists of 324 compute nodes totaling nearly 7,800 cores of the latest-generation Intel Skylake CPUs, and comprises a highly optimized Intel Omni-Path Interconnect architecture for low-latency, high-bandwidth communication. Additional GPGPU compute nodes equipped with the latest NVIDIA VOLTA 100 GPUs contribute to a total peak performance of the HPC cluster at approximately 700 Teraflops.

In addition, a high-performance parallel file system is deployed based on the NEC BxFS-z Storage Appliance with approximately 1.2 Petabytes of usable storage capacity and an aggregate bandwidth of 20 Gigabytes per second (GBytes/s). The storage solution is based on the widely deployed BeeGFS parallel file system made in Germany. It is installed on top of ZFS as the underlying physical filesystem, combining the highest I/O throughput with high availability and reliability, as well as integrated and dynamically configured data integrity and redundancy.

We are very happy that TUK asked us to provide them with a major upgrade and replacement of their HPC environment. It is an honor that we have also been entrusted with an individually designed HPC solution to meet the requirements that TUK was looking to fill,” said Yuichi Kojima, Vice President, HPC EMEA and Managing Director of NEC Deutschland.

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