The high-performance Computer for Advanced Research in Aerospace (CARO) in Göttingen ranked among the top 150 most powerful IT systems in the world when it was commissioned.
The large-scale research facility 'Computer for Advanced Research in Aerospace' (CARO) is used to carry out numerical simulations. When questions of design and optimisation are transferred into mathematical equations, high-performance computing is required to approach possible solutions. For example: the aerodynamic drag experienced by cars or trains, or the stall and wake turbulence of aircraft. The optimal placement of wind turbines or the tuning of combustion processes to targeted at specific goals, such as exhaust gas composition or energy input, can also be simulated with this high-performance computing cluster.
CARO can be used as the second pillar of support – alongside CARA in Dresden – by all DLR institutes to solve problems for which conventional personal computers or servers are not powerful enough. Employees of the Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung (GWDG) operate the cluster for DLR and control access to the supercomputer. By concentrating on the provision of just a few HPC clusters for a wide range of potential users, a high level of effectiveness and efficiency is achieved.
CARO is a very powerful high-performance computing cluster. It has 1364 nodes and is equipped with AMD EPYC processors, each with two sockets and 64 computing cores. The system is water-cooled and has a power consumption of up to 800 kilowatts. The storage system has a capacity of 8.4 petabytes of hard disk drive (HDD). CARO has a maximum computing power of 5.587 trillion computing operations per second.
The operation of the system within the newly built data centre of the University of Göttingen and the GWDG marks an important milestone in DLR history. The computer centre currently meets the highest requirements for energy efficiency. A very low power usage effectiveness (PUE) value of 1.1 can be achieved by cooling the system using water at a relatively high temperature.
Contact
Volker Speelmann
Head of Research Infrastructures
German Aerospace Center (DLR)
Executive Board department for Innovation, Transfer and Research Infrastructure
