The Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ), Cerebras Systems, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced the joint development and delivery of a new system. It is featuring next-generation AI technologies to accelerate scientific research and innovation in AI for Bavaria.

The new system is funded by the Free State of Bavaria through the Hightech Agenda, a program dedicated to strengthening the tech ecosystem in Bavaria to fuel the region’s mission to become an international AI hotspot. The new system is also an additional resource to Germany’s national supercomputing computing center, and part of LRZ’s Future Computing Program that represents a portfolio of heterogeneous computing architectures across CPUs, GPUs, FPGSs, and ASICs. The new system is expected for delivery this summer and will be hosted at LRZ, an institute of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BAdW).

The system will be used by local scientific and engineering communities, to support various research use cases. Some identified applications include Natural Language Processing (NLP), medical image processing involving innovative algorithms to analyze medical images, computer-aided capabilities to accelerate diagnoses and prognosis, and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to advance understanding in areas such as aerospace engineering and manufacturing. It is purpose-built to process large datasets to tackle complex scientific research. The system is comprised of the HPE Superdome Flex server and the Cerebras CS-2 system, which makes it the first solution in Europe to leverage the Cerebras CS-2 system.

"Currently, we observe that AI compute demand is doubling every three to four months with our users. With the high integration of processors, memory, and onboard networks on a single chip, Cerebras enables high performance and speed. This promises significantly more efficiency in data processing and thus faster breakthrough of scientific findings," says Dieter Kranzlmüller, Director of the LRZ. "As an academic computing and national supercomputing center, we provide researchers with advanced and reliable IT services for their science. To ensure optimal use of the system, we will work closely with our users and our partners Cerebras and HPE to identify ideal use cases in the community and to help achieve groundbreaking results."