The Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) of the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate has installed a five-petabyte HPC cluster, MONGON-II, to be used by its researchers and the Helmholtz Institute Mainz (HIM), which specializes in high-energy physics and antimatter.

The system came 65th in the latest Top 500 list of the fastest supercomputers in the world, with 1.9 petaflop/s of computational capacity, and 51st in the Green500 list of the most energy-efficient supercomputers.

Aerial view of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz
Aerial view of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz – JCU

Good mountain university

With a total of 1,040 nodes, each containing two Intel Xeon Gold 6130 CPUs, the cluster is connected to a ZFS-based 5 Petabyte NEC LxFS-z parallel file system, offering bandwidth of up to 80GB/s.

The nodes communicate via Intel’s Omni-Path network, allowing for simple expansion of the system if the need was to present itself.

JGU was established with papal approval in 1477, and is part of the U15, a list of the country’s leading research and medical universities. It is a member of the Alliance for High Performance Computing Rhineland-Palatinate (AHRP) and of the German Gauss Alliance of excellence in HPC.

The university’s main areas of research are particle and hadron physics, material sciences and translational medicine.

Professor André Brinkmann, head of both the “Zentrum für Datenverarbeitung” (Center for Data Processing) and of the Efficient Computing and Storage Group at JGU, said: “We have been working together with NEC for many years now, and we are happy to confirm that this collaboration has always been very fruitful to our research members and to the excellence in research at Mainz University.” 

“The high sustained performance and stability of NEC’s HPC solution, as well as the dedication and skill of their team continuously deliver exceptional results.”