Data Intensive Computing – High Performance Computing
The High Performance Computing and Storage Complex (HRSK-II) and its extension High Performance Computing – Data Analytics (HPC-DA) offers scientists about 60,000 CPU cores and a peak performance of more than 1.5 quadrillion floating point operations per second. The architecture specifically tailored to data-intensive computing, Big Data analytics, and artificial intelligence methods with extensive capabilities for energy measurement and performance monitoring provides ideal conditions to achieve the ambitious research goals of the users and the ZIH.

High Performance Computing with HRSK-II and HPC-DA
As competence center for high performance computing ZIH offers special HPC resources as well as individual support and consulting.
The High Performance Computing and Storage Complex (HRSK-II) with about 60,000 CPU cores, designed and operated by ZIH, achieves a peak performance of more than 1.5 TFLOPS (quadrillion floating point operations per second). Massively parallel applications can also leverage the highly efficient processing power of our 448 GPU accelerators. Additionally, the system is equipped with a shared storage consisting of about 2000 high capacity disks and a network of fast solid-state drives (SSDs) for specialized tasks. Therefore it provides the basis to successfully investigate compute-intensive and data-intensive problems of various scientific disciplines, like computational fluid dynamics, weather and climate modeling, material science, electrodynamics, life sciences, and bioinformatics.
With the extension High Performance Computing – Data Analytics (HPC-DA) the system offers modern and powerful hardware also for data analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence applications. It includes 192 NVIDIA V100 hardware accelerators, a system with 48 TB shared memory, and 2 PB flash memory with a total bandwidth of 2 TB per second.
Software environments for various research topics are available on the system.
The national Big Data and AI competence center ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig consults and supports users around the topics artificial intelligence, data analytics, and high performance computing. Primarily for users of ScaDS.AI ZIH operates an additional system with 272 Nvidia A100 GPUs optimized for machine learning applications.
The data center of the Lehmann Center (LZR) of the TU Dresden combines security and high availability with high power density and long term flexible usability. It is characterized by energy efficiency and, thus, cost efficiency. The hot water cooling of HRSK-II saves more than 250,000 euro of annual operating costs only by the elimination of electrical cooling systems. Additional savings derive from the reuse of computer-dissipated heat in the surrounding buildings. The cooling concept was awarded in 2014 the “German Computing Center Prize” in the category “Energy and Resource Efficient Computing Center”.