The University of Hamburg (UHH) in northern Germany has announced repairs to its Regional Computing Center.

The building housing the data center on the streets of Rothenbaumchaussee and Schlüterstraße in the city of Hamburg has experienced significant structural damage, said the higher education institution, and has been contaminated by pollutants.

No details were released on the cause of the damage, the estimated costs of the renovation works.

“Parts of the facility are still being operated by the computing center, as essential technical infrastructure remains in place,” a UHH spokesperson told DCD. “The UHH is currently coordinating with the relevant authorities regarding further project financing and scheduling. The University is aware of the building’s particular cultural and historical significance and continues to pursue the goal of preserving and using it in the long term. Within its means, it is advancing the necessary planning, stabilization, and refurbishment measures.”

A listed building dating back to the 1960s, the structural damage to the Regional Computing Center was discovered during a routine inspection. Its required repairs will include the removal and replacement of concrete on the building’s load-bearing facade, according to DataCenter Insider. A steel structure will help to stabilize the building until the renovation work is complete.

The Regional Computing Center hosts several high-capacity compute systems. These include “Hummel-2”, a high-performance computing (HPC) cluster used to support complex astrophysical, chemistry and computer science simulations.

The water-cooled HPC cluster consists of 32 general-purpose GPU cores and 178 compute nodes, according to UHH, with a total storage capacity of 5.2 petabytes. "The long-term goal is to reuse approximately two-thirds of the waste heat from the computers by discharging the cooling water, which would correspond to a CO2 saving of about ten to twenty percent," said Prof. Dr.-Ing Sebastian Gerling, UHH’s chief digital officer, in 2024.

It is not the only HPC cluster hosted in Hamburg. Last month, ex-Atos subsidiary Bull delivered the second of two such systems to its client Airbus, to be hosted in a modular data center in the city. Hamburg itself is a medium-sized data center market within Germany, hosting 30 privately-run data centers according to DataCenterMap.

This includes a 4.4MW facility operated by the European data center firm Penta Infra. Opened last year, the site contains 26,900 sq ft (2,500 sqm) of white space and took two years to build.

Learn more about the data center market in Switzerland and the wider DACH region, and meet with other executives and experts at the DCN Zurich event later this year.