Munich to switch on Europe's fastest supercomputer

Munich will soon become the proud new owners of Europe’s fastest supercomputer.

The Leibniz Supercomputing Centre at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Munich has announced the order of the SuperMUC, a massive supercomputer that will run at 3 petaflops - at least twice as fast as the current European champion.

The €83-million IBM based project is due to go live in 2012, will be about 50 times faster than the centre’s existing computer and two or three times faster than the current fastest in Europe, which is at the French Atomic Energy Commission.

The SuperMUC will use more than 14,000 Intel Xeon processors and be able to achieve the work of more than 110,000 PCs. SuperMUC design combines water cooling with energy efficient Intel processors and application oriented, dynamic systems management to reduce energy consumption even further.

No word yet on whether there will be a GPU part to the solution.