TU Darmstadt inaugurates Lichtenberg II High-Performance Computer
2023/07/17
On 11 July 2023, the new Lichtenberg II high-performance computer of TU Darmstadt was officially inaugurated. Prof. Christian Hasse made the importance of HPC resources clear by presenting results from numerical simulations of the Rolls-Royce University Technology Centre regarding pollutant emissions and thermoacoustics, and giving an outlook on hydrogen combustion. The new expansion is invaluable for the application of the developed numerical models to real aero-engine systems.
In mid-2020, the first expansion stage of the Lichtenberg II system with 643 computing nodes was put into operation; this will now be expanded by 581 computing nodes with the second expansion stage. Together, the two expansion stages will provide their users with a theoretical peak performance of approximately 8.5 petaflops (PFlops) per second through processors and 1.7 petaflops per second through accelerators. The main memory totals 563 terabytes, the storage system for data around 6 petabytes.
The Lichtenberg supercomputer, which is operated by the University Computing Center (HRZ) of TU Darmstadt, is one of the fastest university computers in Germany and is represented twice in the current ranking of the Top500 supercomputers worldwide. With its first expansion stage, it is ranked 216th, and with its new (second) expansion stage, it is the winner among the participating Sapphire Rapid systems (4th generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors) and is thus ranked 230th on the list.
The investment costs for the Lichtenberg high-performance computer of 15 million euros are borne in equal parts by the federal government and the state of Hesse.
