Düsseldorf - 18 November 2024 - NEC Deutschland GmbH  announced today that it has put into operation a new and powerful HPC supercomputer at the Regional Computing Centre Cologne (RRZK) of the University of Cologne, one of the largest universities in Germany. The new HPC system RAMSES (Research Accelerator for Modeling and Simulation with Enhanced Security) provides a research infrastructure for the fields of astronomy, quantum physics, medicine, and life science. Among other projects, RAMSES will be used to analyse genomic data, to explore quantum computing algorithms, or to develop and simulate highly complex models of our universe.

The new HPC cluster contains 31,576 CPU cores and 167 Terabytes of main memory in total. The main computational workload is realized by KAYTUS 1U 2-socket servers, equipped with AMD EPYC 9654 / AMD EPYC 7713 CPUs, and KAYTUS 2U2S GPU servers with 40 x NVIDIA H100 and 32 x NVIDIA A30 GPUs in total. In addition, 2 x AMD Instinct GPUs and 2 x NEC Vector Engines were deployed for special workloads. The complete system delivers a peak performance of 4.8 PFLOPS.

The HPC storage is realized by DDN GS400NVX2 systems using IBM Storage Scale as a fully encrypted parallel file system. In addition to a 30 TB full flash file system for the users' home directories, running on a dedicated DDN GS400NVX2, two GS400NVX2 hybrid systems providing 14 PB capacity are used for scratch and project storage. The storage system delivers a write bandwidth of 140 GiB/s.

For high-performance network communication, NVIDIA HDR100 InfiniBand is used throughout.

As the HPC environment required an elevated level of information security, NEC has developed a security concept which is based on the separation of physical and logical system components into different levels and implemented in NEC’s own container-based HPC deployment framework LXC3-neo.

To ensure that sensitive information is always protected, especially during all communication processes between the different system components, all data at rest and in transit is encrypted, on the file system as well as in the main memory.

The complete system has a direct-liquid cooling (DLC) solution, using an inlet temperature of 35 degrees and an outlet temperature of 52 degrees. The heat is then fed back into the primary water circuit for facility heating. This ensures that the energy for operating the system is used in the most efficient way possible.

“NEC has designed and delivered a system architecture and an operating model customised for our areas of application in research collaborations, and we are very happy to have NEC as a long-standing, entrusted partner who delivers high quality in hardware, software, and services,”

Prof. Dr.Ing. Stefan Wesner, Director of the Regional Computing Center Cologne, Head of the Division of Computer Science, points out.

“We are very proud that RRZK at University of Cologne has entrusted us with the deployment of this new and powerful HPC solution. The highly sophisticated environment meeting enhanced security requirements shows that RRZK is at the forefront of modern HPC datacentre management”, Noritaka Hoshi, Managing Director of NEC Deutschland GmbH, underlines.

University of Cologne / RRZK

The University of Cologne is one of the oldest and largest universities in Europe. Due to its outstanding scientific achievements and the high quality and diversity of its degree programmes, it enjoys an excellent international reputation.  The University’s  mission is to create, preserve and impart knowledge, to offer its students and early-career academics outstanding academic education, to qualify them for both academic and professional  careers, to promote cutting-edge research and to drive innovation while focusing on the constantly changing needs and challenges of today’s society.

The Regional Computing Centre Cologne (RRZK) is the central IT service provider of the University of Cologne, managing infrastructure and offering HPC (High-Performance Computing) services to various research groups within the University. Through efficient and innovative services as well as friendly, solution-oriented support, the Regional Computing Centre affords all user groups of the University more time for their core tasks in research, teaching, and administration.

NEC Deutschland GmbH

NEC Deutschland GmbH is a wholly owned subsidiary of NEC Europe Ltd. and is a leading provider of HPC and A.I. solutions, focusing on sustained performance for real-life scientific and engineering applications. NEC delivers technology and professional services to industry and academia. Energy-efficiency is one of the key design objectives, addressed by advanced cooling technologies or by the high-bandwidth vector-architecture, which delivers unprecedented efficiency on real world code. The service capabilities from the operation of complex systems to the optimization of scientific codes and NEC's storage-appliances complete our solution offering.

 

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