The Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences recently celebrated its 50th anniversary by launching the SuperMUC, the world’s fourth most powerful supercomputer. The system, which was built by IBM and runs SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, has the distinction of being the single fastest x86-based supercomputer and the fastest supercomputer in Europe.

A statement issued by SUSE says that the supercomputer has a unique cooling system inspired by human blood circulation that significantly reduces energy consumption. The supercomputer is reportedly designed so that some of the energy can be recaptured and used to heat buildings at the LRZ campus. A report on Slashdot indicates that the computer has the SuperMUC has 147,456 processor cores capable of delivering a total of 3 petaflops of processing power and 324 terabytes of memory.

SUSE, which has operated as an independent business unit of Attachmate since the latter acquired Novell in 2010, has a major physical presence in Germany and has long had strong ties with the European scientific community. LRZ head researcher Dr. Arndt Bode says that SUSE’s proximity makes it easy to collaborate.

“Since 1998, we have relied on SUSE for our high-performance computer sector at the [LRZ]. At that time, it was important to us that SUSE provided technical features that were not included in other Linux distributions,” Dr. Bode said in a statement. “But also important was the geographic vicinity, the direct connection to the development and product management teams at SUSE and their fast support response times. This is still a huge benefit for us and is why all of our high-performance computers and most other systems run on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.”

SUSE Linux runs on approximately one-third of the world’s top 25 supercomputers. Some prominent examples of SUSE-powered supercomputers include Jaguar at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Blacklight at the Pittsburgh Super Computer Center, JUGENE at the Jülich Research Centre, Pleiades at NASA’s Ames Research Center, and Columbia at NASA’s advanced supercomputing facility.