Bavaria gets supercomputer with next Nvidia generation
The Leibniz data center leaves Intel and Lenovo behind. Instead, HPE is building a new system with CPUs and GPUs from Nvidia.
Renderbild des Supercomputers Blue Lion.
(Image: HPE / LRZ)
From 2027, the Leibniz Supercomputing Center (LRZ) of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities will have a new supercomputer. The institute is moving away from Intel as its hardware supplier and Lenovo as its equipment provider. Instead, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is building the new Blue Lion system with processors and accelerators from Nvidia.
The announcement talks about next-generation CPUs and GPUs. These are likely to be the Blackwell successor Rubin (GPU) and the Grace successor Vera (CPU). Nvidia wants to present both in 2026, so a launch in 2027 would fit.
With some delay, the LRZ is still putting SuperMUC-NG Phase 2 into operation. It combines Intel's Xeon processors from the Sapphire Rapids generation (Xeon Platinum 8480+) with Ponte Vecchio accelerators (Data Center GPU Max 1550). The LRZ originally planned to put the expansion into operation in spring 2022. However, construction was not completed until the beginning of 2024 – Validation is due to be completed by the end of the year.
Water cooling with district heating
A direct water cooling system cools all components with a target water temperature of 40 degrees Celsius. The heated water is used for heating via district heating – this already happens with the current hardware in the LRZ offices. HPE considers an expansion to other institutes in the neighborhood to be possible.
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The parties involved are still vague about the targeted performance. There is talk of a 30-fold performance compared to SuperMUC-NG (phase 1). This is based on the HPCG benchmark, which requires more performance than the widely used Linpack of the Top500, where the previous SuperMUC-NG (phase 1) only achieves 208 teraflops (0.208 petaflops), but otherwise 20 (FP64) petaflops.
The Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the Bavarian State Ministry of Science and the Arts (StMWK) are funding Blue Lion with up to 250 million euros in equal shares. The LRZ is part of the distributed Gauss Center for Supercomputing (GCS). The supercomputer will run fluid dynamics and space simulations, for example. The focus is also on AI algorithms.
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