Procurement of next-generation HPC and AI systems of the MPG
MPCDF has contracted two new supercomputers for high-performance computing (HPC) simulations and artificial-intelligence (AI) research in the Max-Planck-Society (MPG) to become operational in the course of 2027.
Earlier this year, MPCDF in collaboration with administrative headquarters of the Max-Planck Society (MPG) launched a Europe-wide call for tenders for procuring a successor for the HPC system Raven of the MPG. With additional budget allocated by the President of the MPG the procurement included a second, GPU-only system dedicated to scientific AI applications complementing MPG’s line of HPC resources. Bids from different vendors and with different technical characteristics were ranked primarily by the compute performance the offered systems will deliver (based on a representative set of 10 HPC applications of the MPG for the HPC system, and the aggregated GPU-performance for the AI system, respectively).
The tender process was successfully concluded on August 18, 2026. In summary, the main characteristics of the contracted, new systems are as follows:
HPC system (Raven successor):
320 CPU-only compute nodes based on AMD EPYC Turin 9655 (61440 CPU cores, 240 TiB RAM total),
59 GPU-accelerated compute nodes based on Nvidia GraceBlackwell GB200 NVL4 (236 GPUs, 43 TiB HBM total),
Nvidia Infiniband NDR (nonblocking fat tree, 400 Gb/s per CPU node, 800 Gb/s per GPU node)
IBM StorageScale with 24 PB HDD, 360 TB NVMe
AI system:
106 4-way GPU-compute nodes based on Nvidia GraceBlackwell GB200 NVL4 (424 GPUs, 77 TiB HBM total)
Nvidia Infiniband XDR (nonblocking fat tree, 800 Gb/s per node)
IBM StorageScale with 1 PB NVMe
The new systems will both be delivered by the well known German company pro-com Datensysteme GmbH, in partnership with AMD, Nvidia, IBM and Lenovo.
Despite the currently very difficult global market situation, the new systems will provide MPG researchers with increased computational power compared to Raven, and in addition a new line of MPG resources for AI research. Installation of the systems will commence in autumn this year with the aim to have the systems in production in the course of 2027.
Contacts:
Erwin Laure, Markus Rampp (Max Planck Computing and Data Facility, Garching)