August 21, 2015 - HPC Specialist Transtec wins 7 Million Euro Deal at Karlsruhe Institute for Technology (K.I.T.)

Karlsruhe Institute for Technology (KIT) has purchased a new HPC cluster solution consisting of more than 1,100 compute nodes, from HPC specialist Transtec. The solution is worth 6.9 million Euro and is the largest deal in the company’s history.

Karlsruhe Institute for Technology (KIT) is a technical university in south Germany’s Baden-Württemberg and a national research lab within the Helmholtz Society. It is one of the leading European institutes for fundamental and applied research in technical areas like material sciences, environmental and energy research, as well as nanotechnology. These research activities require the use of big data analytics and complex simulations, which lead to KIT buying a new HPC cluster solution in a specially built datacenter.
KIT has chosen the Germany Based, European HPC specialist Transtec as the solution partner for delivery and integration. Transtec has thus been able to win against well-known international competition in this Europe-wide public invitation to tender ForHLR Phase 2 (TED 2014/S 162-290100). In collaboration with Lenovo as technology partner, Transtec has been able to provide an integrated total solution that combines high performance with an extremely high energy efficiency. This way, the total cost of ownership for KIT can be reduced dramatically.

The newly procured HPC cluster ForHLR2 will be delivered and deployed by end of 2015, and consists of a Lenovo NeXtScale System combining latest technology with high reliability and energy efficiency. The Lenovo NeXtScale System will be equipped with direct hot-water cooling infrastructure, to provide for an efficient cooling of all components like CPUs, main memory, or I/O cards, and deliver 40 per cent more energy efficiency than air-cooled systems. Another advantage is that the waste heat can be used for other purposes like heating of the facility’s office areas.

“Featuring a peak performance of approximately 1 Petaflop and at the same time consuming only around 420 kilowatts, the solution will belong to the fastest and most energy-efficient systems worldwide,” Robin Kienecker, Sales Manager Technical Computing at transtec, explains.

“We are very happy that we have been asked to deliver and deploy this very large HPC cluster, which combines innovative concepts with technical power, at one of the most renowned research facilities in Europe.” Dr. Oliver Tennert, Director HPC Solutions, adds.

Vincent Pfleger, Country Manager France, completes: “This order, with a size of 6.9 million Euros, is the largest deal in the 35 years of our company’s history. It is one further proof of our competency and our performance in the HPC arena. For us, this is one further step towards becoming the biggest independent European HPC player.”