The Marvin supercomputer has arrived at the University of Bonn near Cologne, Germany.
First purchased in October 2022, Marvin is a scalable GPU partition currently ranked 423rd on the Top500 list.
The arrival of Marvin comes right on schedule, having been promised for Q2 of 2023. The system, provided by Megware, is made up of AMD Epyc 7713 64-core 2GHz and Nvidia A100 SXM4s, and uses an Infiniband NDR. The high-performance computing (HPC) system has a peak performance capability of 2.6 petaflops.
Marvin is expected to be ready for use in Summer 2023.
The HPC's arrival was attended by Prof. Dr. Maren Bennewitz, vice-rector for digitalization and information management, and project manager Dirk Barbi.
"It takes a lot of effort to set up a supercomputer, but the University of Bonn will be rewarded for this in the end with a computer cluster that is impressive in an international comparison," said Barbi.
"In order to achieve this, this system has three components, one of which basically consists of the same calculation turns that everyone knows from their own laptops, but over 18,000 of them. Then there are two other components, each consisting of graphics cards, GPUs and at least over 300 of them."
Prof. Dr. Maren Bennewitz added: "All research areas in the field of simulations or artificial intelligence or analysis of large amounts of data will benefit from the computer.
"Our researchers and also the students in their theses, for example, can now run their most computationally intensive experiments on the mainframe, which was not possible before. This means that more experiments can be carried out in parallel, at the same time, and in less time."
The University is also in the process of converting its facilities to be suitable for the HPC, including installing large cooling plants and chillers to provide an additional 600kW of cooling power.
Megware also provided a GPU cluster at another German university, the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU). Deployed in June 2022, the system was developed alongside Inspur.
