Picture of the month gallery

December 2025

Most components in a data center are designed for functionality. There is only little room for attractive industrial design. However, this is not the case for rack doors, whose purpose is to shield the computer components. These doors are often covered with art prints or—as in the case of our supercomputer Viper—decorated with an organic-looking pattern.

November 2025

Last month, we held the "Fundamentals of Deep Learning" workshop in collaboration with NVIDIA. Experts from the MPCDF and NVIDIA, a manufacturer of graphics processing units (GPUs) and software, provided training with the aim of enabling participants to tackle their own projects using a modern deep learning framework and gain initial experience with deep learning data types and model architectures. Users from MPG research facilities benefited greatly from the practical hands-on format and the wealth of expertise provided.

October 2025

Power outages are rare, but they can lead to the failure of important systems and even cause considerable damage, for example, to storage systems. To prevent this, we have an uninterruptible power supply. Lead-acid batteries connected in series can supply power to the most important systems for several minutes, which allows the emergency power generator (powered by a diesel engine) to start up and take over. Our batteries can keep network components, storage systems, and important management computers running.

September 2025

The vertical rods on the roof are not antennas, but lightning conductors for our data center. An uncontrolled lightning strike and the associated excess voltage could severely damage or even destroy the sensitive electronics in our buildings. Statistically, Upper Bavaria experiences many lightning strikes. Last year, about 1.7 lightning strikes per square kilometer were detected in the Munich area. In contrast, the German average is only approximately 0.6 lightning strikes per square kilometer and year.

August 2025

A banana tree is thriving in our courtyard, now over two meters tall after just four years. Even in summer, when many are on vacation, our supercomputers run at full capacity. Users don't need to stay logged in to run their simulations. Instead, they submit compute jobs to a queue, where they are scheduled and executed by our job management system. We wish you a sunny and relaxing August—whether you are working, traveling, or simply enjoying the shade of a banana tree!

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.

June 2025 - The Server Hall At Night

In silence deep, the hall lies still,
A vaulted space, metallic, chill.
The hum of thought, a constant stream,
Machines at work within a dream.
No moonlight falls through windowed pane—
There are no stars, no wind, no rain.
Yet galaxies of light ignite,
In blinking blue and emerald light.
Each LED a whispered code,
A pulse upon a silent road.
A million eyes that never sleep,
In circuits vast and logic deep.
Between the racks, the shadows creep,
Where data flows and secrets keep.
The air is cool, precise, aware,
As if the night itself could stare.
Here time dissolves in endless hum,
Of power drawn and work undone.
No voice, no hand, no beating heart—
And yet, this place, it lives in part.
So in this dark, the glow remains,
A quiet mind with silent brains.
A temple built of wire and light—
The server hall that dreams at night.

May 2025

Modern supercomputers are equipped with graphics processing units (GPUs) to accelerate scientific simulations and machine-learning applications. Also our new supercomputer Viper consists of a GPU-powered section that has recently reached its final configuration. The six racks host 300 compute nodes with two AMD Instinct MI300A chips each. These processors are based on a new architecture that is also being used in the currently fastest supercomputer El Capitan at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, US. Our system Viper is expected to be among the 50 fastest supercomputers.

April 2025

The racks of all our computers are standing on a raised floor, which allows our technicians to easily access the hardware components. Cables and water pipes are properly layed in the level underneath also enhancing working safety, because trip hazards are avoided. The raised floor has a working height of 80 cm thus providing enough space for all required infrastructure.

March 2025

About 420 Petabytes of scientific data is currently stored in our long-term archive. It consists of 55,000 tapes (green and blue boxes) each able to save 9 to 18 Terabytes of data. Several tape robots move the tapes into the tape drives up to 4000 times per day. Each file is stored at two different sites and copied to new tapes every few years to guarantee data integrity for decades. The oldest dataset in our archive has been written to tape more than 40 years ago.

February 2025

This picture shows two of thirty coolant pumps with a power of 25 kilowatts each. In total, they circulate about 480,000 liters of water per hour through a complex pipe system to cool our various computers. Like all critical systems at MPCDF, the pumps are laid out redundantly. Each pair of pumps alternates every week to ensure that these machines are worn evenly.

January 2025

Two large v-shaped coolers are standing on the roof of our technical building. In summer, they carry away heat from the chilling machines that cool down the hot water coming from the various computers. In winter when the outside temperature is sufficiently low, a cooling power of up to 3 Megawatts can be reached. The chilling machines can then be bypassed and the hot water from the computing systems can be cooled directly with the winter's air.

December 2024

Water is pumped through the coppery pipes on this compute node. It transports thermal energy away from the sensitive hardware components, which can heat up to 80 degrees Celsius at full load. The electric power of a compute node depends on its configuration: A typical Raven node without GPUs consumes 500 Watts, while a GPU-equipped node reaches 1700 Watts.

November 2024

With great interest and protected from the noisy computing machines by earplugs, visitors streamed into the otherwise always closed computer center on 3 October 2024. "How much wind and heat is buzzing around here and it's loud, too", said one schoolchild in amazement as he stood in front of the open door of one of the computer racks. In the morning, even the "Maus" curiously wandered into the computer hall and had a photo taken with our Director, Erwin Laure. Thank you for a great day!

October 2024

Fiber-optical network cables connect the compute nodes of our supercomputers. They are able to transfer 100 Gigabit per second, which ordinary copper cables could never achieve. Wiring each of the several hundred nodes with all others would be too expensive. Instead, the network has a tree-like shape. This layout provides a low latency (= transmission delay) and a high bandwidth (= data throughput) at a reasonable cost.

September 2024

These cables distribute the electric energy from our five transformers to the supercomputers and all other consumers at MPCDF. Each of them is capable of transporting an electric current of 450 Ampere. At the moment, our total electric power is about 3.3MW. The machines consume as much energy as a small town with a growing fraction of renewable energy. Details about our energy mix and carbon footprint are reported here https://www.mpcdf.mpg.de/about/co2-footprint