The Zuse Institute Berlin (ZIB) and the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB) have signed an agreement to establish an AI and HPC data center in the Adlershof area of Berlin, Germany.

Revealed by the Adlershof Technology Park on March 27, the data center will be established in several stages and will enable the implementation of high-performance computing (HPC) and AI technologies for the processing of research data.

The first stage will see ZIB consolidating its infrastructure in Berlin-Dahlem, to be then operated on behalf of partners. Simultaneously, a new site will be established with "expanded hardware" at the HZB Berlin-Adlershof site.

The second phase sees "additional computing capacities" planned, but remain unspecified as this will depend on the "further needs of the scientific community."

A "kicking off" ceremony was held on March 27. Details about the planned hardware to be deployed or the expected compute power of the systems have not been shared.

Senator for science, health and care, Dr. Ina Czyborra, said of the project: “With the new data center, two strong partners are creating the digital power infrastructure that modern cutting-edge research needs today. In materials, health, and climate research in particular, data usage and processing are essential and of ever-increasing importance. The data center meets this growing demand whilst simultaneously strengthening the technological independence and resilience of our research hub.”

ZIB president Professor Christof Schütte said: “The new Data, Compute and AI Center is closely linked to the Zuse Institute Berlin’s vision of further developing modeling, AI, and high-performance computing as the foundation of modern science. Here, a collaborative infrastructure for data-intensive cutting-edge research is being established, one that relies on powerful, flexible, and secure operating models. It represents a strategic investment in Berlin’s scientific excellence."

Professor Bernd Rech, HZB’s scientific director, added: “Together with the ZIB, we are laying the foundations for the next generation of data-driven materials science. High-performance computing and AI-supported methods open up new avenues for predicting material properties and significantly accelerating innovation. The collaboration also strengthens the IT infrastructure at our BESSY II light source and paves the way for our planned successor source, BESSY III,” said

Bessy II is a third-generation synchrotron radiation source that produces X-ray light that can be used for experiments.

According to HZB's website, it currently operates a small HPC cluster dubbed Z1, which has 20 Nvidia A40 GPUs, four nodes with four A100s and 40GB of memory, and four nodes with four A100s with 80GB. HZB is part of the Helmholtz Association's HPC Gateway, which sees eight different sites compiling and sharing their HPC infrastructure.

ZIB, meanwhile, has played host to supercomputers since 1984, when it saw a Cray 1M system installed at the site. ZIB currently has two HLRN-III systems - Konrad located in Berlin, and Gottfried in Hanover, which are connected via a dedicated 10Gbps fiber link. According to the ZIB website, the current installation sees each site having a four-cabinet Cray XC30 system of 744 nodes with 24 Intel Ivybridge cores each, 46.5 TByte distributed memory, and 1.4 PByte on-line disk storage in a Lustre filesystem.