Records and Highlights
 

Super computers enabling cutting-edge research at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics and the Leibniz Universität IT Services (LUIS).

Around 1,750 stand-alone computers form the "ATLAS" cluster at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute). It is the sixth fastest scientific computer in Germany and the only one of its kind in northern Germany. ATLAS can achieve a performance of more than 32.8 x 10¹² floating-point operations per second (teraflop/s), which means that it is 2000 times more powerful than a normal PC. Because of this, the world's best analysis of gravitational waves is possible due to all the relevant data being merged in Hannover.

Further information about this can be found under

• www.aei-hannover.de

At the Leibniz Universität IT Services (LUIS) in Hannover is the HLRN-II supercomputer. Its counterpart, constructed in the same way, is in Berlin. Both computers belong to the North German Supercomputing Alliance (HLRN), a cooperation at federal state level between the states of Berlin, Bremen, Hamburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein. The locations in Hannover and Berlin are connected to a 10-gigabit data link, which allows almost a million pages to be transmitted per second. The Leibniz Universität IT Services (LUIS) in Hannover and the Konrad Zuse Centre for Information Technology (ZIB) in Berlin are operators of the powerful computer system with approximately 25,000 processor kernels. The powerhouse cost around 30 million Euros and will help researchers throughout northern Germany to tackle scientific problems, so-called "Grand Challenge Projects", which would otherwise either be too expensive or would take too long to be solved in the laboratory.

Further information about this can be found under

• www.hlrn.de