MPCDF picture of the month: July 2025
When you think of computing centers, long alleys of racks are what typically comes to mind. Indeed, various large systems are installed in our halls. Besides the high-performance computers, also the data storage systems occupy much space, as shown on this picture. Monitoring and maintenance of these machines is mainly done remotely via the network. During normal operations, you can rarely find a technician working between the racks.
High-performance computing and data analytics application support for the MPG
The MPCDF provides high-level support for the development, optimization, analysis and visualization of high-performance computing (HPC) and data analytics (HPDA) applications to Max-Planck Institutes with high-end computing needs, e.g. in astrophysics, fusion research, materials and bio sciences, polymer research, and theoretical chemistry.
MPG supercomputer Viper
Viper-CPU: Based on AMD EPYC Genoa 9554 processors: 768 CPU compute nodes, 98304 CPU cores, 432 TB RAM (DDR5), 4.9 PFlop/s theoretical peak performance (FP64). 200 Gb/s Interconnect (Nvidia NDR200, nonblocking fat-tree fabric over all nodes). Operational since June 2024.
MPG Supercomputer Viper
Viper-GPU: Based on AMD Instinct MI300A APUs: 300 nodes, 600 MI300A APUs, 75 TB RAM (HBM3). 400 Gb/s Interconnect (Nvidia NDR, nonblocking fat-tree fabric over all nodes). Operational since February 2025.
MPG supercomputer Raven
Based on Intel Xeon IceLake-SP processor 8360Y and Nvidia A100 GPU: 1592 CPU-compute nodes, 114,624 CPU-cores, 457 TB RAM (DDR4), 8.8 PFlop/s theoretical peak performance (FP64), 192 GPU-accelerated nodes providing 768 Nvidia A100 GPUs, 30 TB GPU RAM (HBM2), 16 PFlop/s theoretical peak performance (FP64, including tensor cores and host CPUs). HDR InfiniBand interconnect.
IBM tape library
IBM TS4500 tape library. In total, MPCDF tape libraries provide a capacity of more than 105,000 LTO tape slots and 200 LTO tape drives and store more than 300 Petabytes of long-term archives (HPSS) and backups (IBM Spectrum Protect). The data archives of Max-Planck scientists include experiment and simulation data from many science areas, e.g. from life and materials sciences, astro and fusion research, and also treasures of the World Heritage like sound recordings of endangered languages or images of historic frescoes.
National and international projects
The MPCDF, in partnership with different Max Planck Institutes is engaged in several national and international projects and research consortia, such as EU Centers of Excellence, with a focus in high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, data analytics, and data management.
Science use cases
The brochure "High-Performance Computing and Data Science in the Max Planck Society" shows examples of cutting-edge science in the Max Planck Society which were enabled by MPCDF services.
Welcome to the Max Planck Computing and Data Facility (MPCDF)
News at MPCDF
News
The GPU-powered part of MPCDF’s new supercomputer Viper was successfully benchmarked and ranked high in the most recent issues of the semi-annual Top500 and Green500 lists which were released on June 10, 2025 at the International Supercomputing ...
Using supercomputers and software at the MPCDF, a team of astronomers led by Michael Janssen (Radboud University, The Netherlands and MPI for Radioastronomy, Bonn) has trained a neural network with millions of synthetic black hole data sets.
Eleven Max-Planck Institutes, together with the MPCDF have joined forces to deploy a dedicated GPU machine specifically for AI applications. A corresponding kick-off workshop was recently hosted by the MPCDF.
A new issue of the MPCDF computer bulletin Bits&Bytes was released. Read about the new, GPU-powered part of the HPC system Viper, a new release of the ELPA eigensolver library, new capabilities for testing for AMD GPUs in the MPCDF gitlab-CI ...