Recently, the Computer Centre of the University of Augsburg received funding for a new high-performance computing cluster (HPC) from the German Research Foundation (DFG). The additional computational capacity will be a valuable resource for the various computational and data-intensive research projects underway at the university. Research projects in the fields of physics, material sciences, medicine, mathematics, geography, and informatics will all benefit from the infrastructure.

The new compute cluster LICCA (Linux Compute Cluster Augsburg) consists of 59 compute nodes with 128 cores (AMD EPYC) each, providing a total of 7552 computational cores. The nodes are equipped with at least 1 TB RAM, providing 8 GB of RAM per core. The nodes are interconnected with a 200 Gb/s Mellanox system. Additionally, the cluster is equipped with 24 NVIDIA A100 graphics as well as a 4 PB GPFS-based parallel storage system. The inclusion of graphic cards will allow for GPU intensive applications like machine learning.

As collaborators in the application, the Chair of Model-based Environmental Exposure Science will benefit as well. The cluster will allow the Chair to perform computational simulations of environmental factors and exposure scenarios. This will include the WRF-Chem and PALM simulations as well as an Agent-based model with millions of agents.