Transtec, the European integrator based in Germany, has announced the largest contract in the firm’s history for the delivery of a 1,100 node cluster to the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), worth 6.9 million Euros. The machine should be installed by the end of this year.
Located in Baden-Württemberg, the KIT is one of Germany’s foremost technology research universities, working in fields such as materials science; the environment; energy; and nanotechnology. Because these topics involve complex simulations and compute-intensive data analysis, the Institute has decided to procure the cluster for its own data centre.
Transtec won the contract against stiff international competition, with a particular selling point being the system’s high energy efficiency. This was attractive to the Institute as it lowers the total cost of ownership due to lower running costs.
The cluster is based on Lenovo’s NeXtScale-System, and uses direct warm water cooling to the processors. It offers up to 40 per cent more energy efficiency and around 10 per cent higher compute performance than air-cooled solutions, according to Transtec. A further advantage is that a large proportion of the waste heat from the computer can be used for other purposes, including for example, the heating of the building.
With a peak performance in the Petaflops range and with an energy consumption as low as 420 kW, the solution will be one of the fastest and most energy efficient HPC clusters in the world, according to Robin Kienecker, sales manager technical computing at Transtec.
Dr Oliver Tennert, director of HPC solutions at Transtec, added: ‘We are very happy that we have been asked to deliver and deploy this very large HPC cluster, which combines innovative concepts with technical power, at one of the most renowned research facilities in Europe.'
