MPIE Computer Cluster again in worldwide Top 500
For the second time the MPIE computer cluster has made it into the worldwide Top 500. With more than 41 Terra-Flops it landed on the 459th spot on the list and on rank 29 in Germany. FLOPS is an abbreviation for “floating point operations per second”. It is used as an indicator for the capacity of computer systems and shows the amount of so called floating decimal operations – which are easy calculation steps such as summation and multiplication – made per second. With this specification it is possible to measure the entire computer architecture, not only single components as the processor speed. 41 Terra-Flops equal 41.000 Giga-Flops that means 41 Billion computer operations per second. This extreme performance capacity is made possible by 5664 processing cores and 15100 Gigabyte working memory. A standard computer has 2-6 cores and about 2-8 Gigabytes memory. An elaborate water cooling system and modern energy saving techniques guarantee an efficient cooling.
The cluster was introduced in 2011 and complements its predecessor, which made it upto rank 355 in 2009. With the help of these two computer systems complex quantum physical calculations are being made to develop new steels and alloys. The department “Computational Materials Design” of Prof. Jörg Neugebauer is able to predict material properties and trends with the help of calculations and thus helps to save time and material for doing experiments.