NHR@FAU GPU cluster “Helma” hits #51 in the 65th Top500 list
The 65th Top500 list was released today at the ISC High Performance 2025 Conference in Hamburg, Germany. The list ranks the 500 fastest supercomputers in the world using the “High Performance LINPACK” benchmark.
Helma, NHR@FAU’s GPU supercomputer, was recently expanded with another 96 nodes for a total of 768 H100 and H200 GPUs. We are thrilled to announce that Helma now ranks 51st in the current list, with a LINPACK performance of 32.22 Pflop/s. This is again the highest Top500 ranking of any system at FAU ever. It is now the fastest supercomputer at German universities and ranks #3 within Germany, surpassed only by two systems at Jülich Supercomputing Center (JSC), which is part of the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS).
In the November 2024 Top500 list, its first part (comprising 384 H100 GPUs) was ranked #79. Just in time for ISC 2025, system integrator MEGWARE from Chemnitz managed to run and optimize the LINPACK benchmark, which solves a large, dense system of linear equations, on the extended system. Helma complements NHR@FAU’s workhorses Alex and Fritz, which are also listed in the Top500 as #292 and #323.
The H200 part of Helma is a special-purpose system that will support the development of a new Bavarian foundation model. The H100 part, which was installed in the fall of 2024 and run in “friendly user mode” since, will go into official operation soon.
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.
The Helma system was funded by the State of Bavaria, the NHR program, the FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, the University of Technology Nuremberg (UTN) and the universities of applied sciences in Hof and Landshut. We are grateful to all our partners for jointly enabling such a powerful system for science and research.