A transitional supercomputer, called Hunter, will begin operation in 2025
The University of Stuttgart and Hewlett Packard Enterprise have inked a deal to build two new supercomputers at the High-Performance Computing Center of the University of Stuttgart (HLRS).
In the first stage, a transitional supercomputer, called Hunter, will begin operation in 2025. This will be followed in 2027 with the installation of Herder, an exascale system that will provide a significant expansion of Germany’s high-performance computing (HPC) capabilities. Hunter and Herder will offer researchers world-class infrastructure for simulation, artificial intelligence (AI), and high-performance data analytics (HPDA) to power cutting-edge academic and industrial research in computational engineering and the applied sciences.
“HPE has been a reliable partner since 2019, and we are excited to be making the jump with them to the next order of magnitude in computing performance, the exaFLOP”
Prof. Dr. Michael Resch (Director, High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart)
The total combined cost for Hunter and Herder is €115 million. Funding will be provided through the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS), the alliance of Germany’s three national supercomputing centers. Half of this funding will be provided by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), and the second half by the State of Baden-Württemberg’s Ministry of Science, Research, and Arts.
Hunter to Herder: a two-step climb to exascale
Hunter will replace HLRS’s current flagship supercomputer, Hawk. It is conceived as a stepping stone to enable HLRS’s user community to transition to the massively parallel, GPU-accelerated structure of Herder.
Hunter will be based on the HPE Cray EX4000 supercomputer, which is designed to deliver exascale performance to support large-scale workloads across modeling, simulation, AI, and HPDA. Each of the 136 HPE Cray EX4000 nodes will be equipped with four HPE Slingshot high-performance interconnects. Hunter will also leverage the next generation of Cray ClusterStor, a storage system purpose-engineered to meet the demanding input/output requirements of supercomputers, and the HPE Cray Programming Environment, which offers programmers a comprehensive set of tools for developing, porting, debugging, and tuning applications.
Hunter will be based on the AMD Instinct™ MI300A accelerated processing unit (APU), which combines CPU and GPU processors and high-bandwidth memory into a single package. By reducing the physical distance between different types of processors and creating unified memory, the APU enables fast data transfer speeds, impressive HPC performance, easy programmability and great energy efficiency. This will slash the energy required to operate Hunter in comparison to Hawk by approximately 80% at peak performance.
Prof. Dr. Michael Resch (Director, High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart), said, “HPE has been a reliable partner since 2019, and we are excited to be making the jump with them to the next order of magnitude in computing performance, the exaFLOP. Using GPU technology from AMD, we are also confident that we will be well prepared for the challenges of the future.”
For researchers in Stuttgart, Hunter and Herder will open many new opportunities for research across a wide range of applications in engineering and the applied sciences. For example, they will enable the design of more fuel-efficient vehicles, more productive wind turbines, and new materials for electronics and other applications. New AI capabilities will open new opportunities for manufacturing and offer innovative approaches for making large-scale simulations faster and more energy efficient.
