From the Energy Revolution to new materials, from Astrophysics to the Earth System Sciences: To understand natural and technical processes in all their complexity, researchers use the fastest high-performance computers in the world. With the "Hochleistungsrechner Karlsruhe" - HoreKa for short - Karlsruhe Institute of Technology is providing a new supercomputer for many disciplines. The system was handed over to the scientific communities in Summer 2021.

When it was commissioned in mid-2021, HoreKa was among the 15 most powerful computers in Europe and ranked 13th in the international supercomputer rankings in terms of energy efficiency. It can provide a computing power of more than 17 PetaFLOPS or 17 quadrillion computing operations per second, which corresponds to the performance of more than 150,000 laptops. 

The system is available to scientists from all over Germany. Thanks to the new supercomputer, researchers in the areas of Earth System Sciences, the Materials Sciences, Energy and Mobility research in Engineering and Particle Physics will be able to gain a more detailed understanding of highly complex natural and technical processes.

 
HoreKa

Two Innovative Chip Technologies – One High-Performance System

HoreKa is an innovative hybrid system with almost 60.000 Intel Xeon "Ice Lake" Scalable Processor cores, 220 terabytes of main memory as well as 668 NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs. A non-blocking NVIDIA Mellanox InfiniBand HDR network with 200 GBit/s per port is used for communication between the nodes. Two Spectrum Scale parallel file systems offer a total storage capacity of more than 16 petabytes.

A central aspect in the design of the system have been the enormous amounts of data generated by scientific research projects. Depending on the application, several hundred terabytes of data can be generated by a single simulation. To keep up with the growing amounts of data, the computing nodes, the InfiniBand network, and the parallel file systems of HoreKa each provide up to four times the throughput of its predecessor system, ForHLR.
 

Computation and storage go hand in hand

A multi-level data storage concept also guarantees high-throughput processing of data on external storage systems. HoreKa is connected to the “Large Scale Data Facility” (LSDF) of the SCC, which has been providing a modern infrastructure for the storage, administration, archiving, and analysis of research data since 2010, with a data rate of up to 45 GByte/s.

HoreKa has been installed in a state-of-the-art data center constructed for its predecessor ForHLR on KIT‘s Campus North in 2015.

 

Project applications and documentation

Applications for computing time on HoreKa can be submitted at any time. For more information on project proposals, as well as on technical details, software support and other topics, please refer to the system documentation.