NEWS

On 16 January the High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS) welcomed distinguished guests and members of its scientific and industrial user communities to celebrate the inauguration of its new supercomputer, Hunter. Designed and manufactured by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Hunter will offer a world-class infrastructure for large-scale simulation, artificial intelligence, and data analytics applications in science, industry, and the public sector. Furthermore, Hunter will support HLRS’s users’ diverse research portfolios, helping to address complex problems in engineering, weather and climate modeling, biomedical research, and materials science, among other fields. 

“The rapid development of AI and increasing focus on sustainability in supercomputing mean that high-performance computing (HPC) is going through an exciting, transformative period,” said Prof. Michael Resch, Director of HLRS. “With Hunter, our user community gains a state-of-the-art infrastructure that will support them in navigating this changing HPC landscape and enable them to remain competitive at the frontiers of scientific discovery and industrial innovation.”

HLRS is one of three German national high-performance computing centers that comprise the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing.

With a theoretical peak performance of 48.1 petaflops (48.1 quadrillion floating point operations per second), Hunter’s speed is nearly double that of HLRS’s previous flagship supercomputer, called Hawk. At the same time, Hunter represents an important shift in computing architecture for the center. Whereas past systems have relied primarily on large numbers of CPUs to achieve high performance, Hunter is based on AMD Instinct APUs, which combine CPUs, GPU accelerators, and high bandwidth memory in a single package. While the machine enables higher performance, this architecture also means Hunter consumes 80 percent less energy at peak performance than Hawk. 

Hunter will also implement a dynamic power capping software functionality developed by HPE in collaboration with HLRS to maximize computational productivity and energy efficiency. This functionality will continuously monitor the applications running on Hunter, optimize power distribution to each application based on its individual power requirements, and ensure that overall energy consumption does not exceed a predetermined power limit.

Hunter is conceived as a transitional system that will prepare the way for HLRS’s next supercomputer, called Herder, which is being planned for installation by HPE in 2027. With a top speed of several hundred petaflops per second, Herder will constitute a major jump in peak performance over Hunter. Because Hunter has a similar accelerated architecture to Herder, it offers HLRS’s user community the opportunity to prepare their application codes to take full advantage of the massive increase in computational power that will soon be available.

The total cost of Hunter was 15 million Euros. The Baden-Württemberg Ministry for Science, Research, and Art provided half of the funding in conjunction with its high-performance computing/data intensive computing (HPC/DIC) strategy. Germany’s Federal Ministry for Education and Research provided the second half, and financing was facilitated by the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS). 

For more information on Hunter, read the full HLRS press release.