German Climate Computation Center

The German Climate Computing Centre (DKRZ) is a non-profit and non-commercial limited company with four shareholders: the Max Planck Society, the City of Hamburg (represented by the University of Hamburg), the Helmholtz Centre Geesthacht, and the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven.

As a national service provider, DKRZ operates a supercomputer centre to enable climate simulation and provides the scientific users with the technical infrastructure needed for processing and analysis of climate data. This also includes support for related application software, advice and support in data processing issues.

The users from the MPS come primarily from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz as well as from the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena.

Contact

Bundesstr. 45a
20146 Hamburg
Phone: +49 40 460094-0
Fax: +49 40 460094-270

ESiWACE: Towards cloud resolving climate models

2016 Neumann, Philipp; Biercamp, Joachim

Climate Research Computer Science

Quantitative estimates for extreme weather situations are of essential importance. For this purpose, simulation models are required that are able to resolve clouds as well as fine-scale eddies in ocean flow. These models have to provide a resolution of one kilometer and need to be able to predict several months per calendar day. ESiWACE combines weather and climate sciences and targets the optimization of simulation workflows on supercomputers. A main goal is the investigation of technical feasibility and limitations of cloud-resolving models.

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Mistral: Final expansion stage of the high-performance computer at DKRZ starts operation

2016 Böttinger, Michael; Meyer, Jana

Climate Research Computer Science

In July 2016 the second expansion stage of Mistral, the third "High-performance computing system for Earth system research" (HLRE-3), started its operation. The system by Atos/Bull delivers a peak performance of 3.6 quadrillion numerical operations per second to the German climate research community. In November Mistral occupied position no. 34 worldwide on the TOP500 list and is currently the third most powerful German HPC system. Mistral’s parallel file system has a capacity of 54 petabytes and occupies position no. 2 on the vi4io.org list, which compares the largest file systems worldwide.

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New supercomputer at DKRZ ensures Germany’s leading position in climate research

2015 Böttinger, Michael; Meyer, Jana

Climate Research Computer Science Earth Sciences

In 2015 DKRZ took its third high performance computing system for earth system research (HLRE-3) into operation. 41 million euros, funded by BMBF and HGF, enabled DKRZ to install the new energy-efficient PetaFLOPS supercomputer “Mistral”, to upgrade its HPSS archive system, as well as to adapt the datacenter's technical infrastructure to the new requirements. Mistral is installed in two phases: its first phase took up the operation in July. Its final stage, planned to be completed in summer 2016, will deliver three PetaFLOPs. In October, DKRZ and numerous guests officially inaugurated Mistral.

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High volume data storage and energy efficiency

2014 Ludwig, Thomas; Dolz, Manuel; Kuhn, Michael; Kunkel, Julian; Lenhart, Hermann

Climate Research Computer Science

The research group "scientific computing" of Thomas Ludwig at DKRZ and at the Universität Hamburg puts its focus on the storage of high volume data sets in high performance computing systems and investigates issues of energy efficiency. Innovative new compression algorithms reduce the storage space for data intensive climate simulations and optimize the energy consumption of the respective storage systems. Complementary to this, the groups offers lecture courses at the university in the area of technical and methodological aspects of high performance computing.

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25 years of high performance computing for climate research

2013 Böttinger, Michael; Meyer, Jana

Climate Research Computer Science Earth Sciences

For more than 25 years the German Climate Computing Center has been providing high performance computing platforms, data storage systems and related services exclusively and tailor-made to the German climate research. This lays the foundation for world-class climate science which is reflected in the contributions to the official symposium and the user workshop in February 2013 on the occasion of DKRZ’s anniversary. The following article will briefly review the exciting first 25 years of DKRZ.

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