transtec win €7m deal at KIT

6th August 2015

Jordan Mulcare

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Karlsruhe Institute for Technology (KIT) has purchased a HPC cluster solution consisting of more than 1,100 compute nodes, from HPC specialist Transtec. The solution is worth €6.9m and is the largest deal in the company's history. KIT is a technical university in south Germany's Baden-Württemberg and a national research lab within the Helmholtz Society. 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 datacentre.

KIT has chosen the German 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 recently procured HPC cluster ForHLR2 will be delivered and deployed by the 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% 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, 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.

Matthew Prew, Managing Director, Transtec, completes: "This order, with a size of €6.9m, 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."