New NHR@FAU cluster “Helma” hits rank #79 in Top500 list

The 64th Top500 list was released today at the SC24 Conference in Atlanta, Georgia. It ranks the 500 fastest supercomputers in the world according to the “High Performance LINPACK” benchmark, which solves a large, dense system of linear equations.

We are thrilled to announce that the first part of the “Helma” cluster at NHR@FAU has just been installed and ranks 79th in the current list, with a LINPACK performance of 16.94 Pflop/s. This is the highest Top500 ranking of any system at Friederich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) ever. Helma comprises 96 nodes with four NVIDIA H100 GPUs each, for a total of 384 GPUs. Each GPU is equipped with 94 GB of HBM2e memory. The cluster’s NHR-200 pruned fat-tree network features one link per GPU for a total bandwidth of 800 Gbit/s per node and direction for islands of 96 GPUs and a blocking factor of 3:1.

The cluster was delivered and installed by MEGWARE from Chemnitz, Germany. On top of numerous applications in the areas of atomistic simulations, quantum chemistry, and materials science, Helma will run workloads for the fast-growing AI user community at FAU and universities all over Germany. 200 of the GPUs will be available for researchers in Bavaria via the BayernKI program. Beyond BayernKI, funding for the hardware came from NHR, the University of Technology Nuremberg (UTN), FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, and the Universities of Applied Sciences in Hof and Landshut.

The cluster is named after Wilhelmine, Margravine of Brandenburg-Bayreuth (1709–1758). Together with her husband Friedrich (1711–1763) she founded the University of Erlangen in 1743.

Helma will be accessible for user operation in Q1/2025 and will complement NHR@FAU’s two working horses Alex and Fritz which are also listed in the TOP500 ranked as #252 and #283.

Kategorie: Allgemein, HPC, Systems