NEC is awarded the contract to supply the successor system of the HPC cluster CARA
As a key technology in science and research, high-performance computing (HPC) provides access to large computing capacities. With the two HPC clusters CARA and CARO, the German Aerospace Center (DLR) offers all DLR institutes high-performance computing resources that are used to solve problems for which standard PCs or servers have too little computing power or storage capacity. In addition to numerical simulations, for example stall and wake vortices in aircraft, flow resistance of cars or trains, optimal positioning of wind turbines or reducing pollutants and increasing the efficiency of combustion processes, these high-performance computing clusters can also be used to carry out AI applications and data analyses. In line with DLR's HPC strategy, the CARA HPC cluster in Dresden will be renewed at the end of this year. The Japanese electronics company NEC has been commissioned to carry out this renewal. The planned replacement will provide all DLR institutes with resources for demanding simulations and research questions in the future.
The renewal includes:
- 770 compute nodes, each with 2 AMD EPYC 9555 processors (64 cores each)
- 30 compute nodes, each with 2 Intel Xeon Gold 6530 processors (32 cores each) and 4 Nvidia H100 GPUs
- IBM Storage Scale System 6000 with 30 PB capacity (including approx. 2.2 PB NVMe flash storage technology)
The expansion of the CARA system, which went into operation in 2022, will continue to operate for the time being, providing users with additional resources:
- 664 nodes, each with 2 AMD EPYC 7702 processors (64 cores each)
- 10 computing nodes, each with 2 AMD EPYC 7702 processors (64 cores each) and 4 Nvidia A100 GPUs