German Climate Computation Center

Quantitative estimates for extreme weather situations are of essential importance. For this purpose, simulation models are required that are able to resolve clouds as well as fine-scale eddies in ocean flow. These models have to provide a resolution of one kilometer and need to be able to predict several months per calendar day. ESiWACE combines weather and climate sciences and targets the optimization of simulation workflows on supercomputers. A main goal is the investigation of technical feasibility and limitations of cloud-resolving models.

In July 2016 the second expansion stage of Mistral, the third "High-performance computing system for Earth system research" (HLRE-3), started its operation. The system by Atos/Bull delivers a peak performance of 3.6 quadrillion numerical operations per second to the German climate research community. In November Mistral occupied position no. 34 worldwide on the TOP500 list and is currently the third most powerful German HPC system. Mistral’s parallel file system has a capacity of 54 petabytes and occupies position no. 2 on the vi4io.org list, which compares the largest file systems worldwide.

In 2015 DKRZ took its third high performance computing system for earth system research (HLRE-3) into operation. 41 million euros, funded by BMBF and HGF, enabled DKRZ to install the new energy-efficient PetaFLOPS supercomputer “Mistral”, to upgrade its HPSS archive system, as well as to adapt the datacenter's technical infrastructure to the new requirements. Mistral is installed in two phases: its first phase took up the operation in July. Its final stage, planned to be completed in summer 2016, will deliver three PetaFLOPs. In October, DKRZ and numerous guests officially inaugurated Mistral.

The research group "scientific computing" of Thomas Ludwig at DKRZ and at the Universität Hamburg puts its focus on the storage of high volume data sets in high performance computing systems and investigates issues of energy efficiency. Innovative new compression algorithms reduce the storage space for data intensive climate simulations and optimize the energy consumption of the respective storage systems. Complementary to this, the groups offers lecture courses at the university in the area of technical and methodological aspects of high performance computing.

For more than 25 years the German Climate Computing Center has been providing high performance computing platforms, data storage systems and related services exclusively and tailor-made to the German climate research. This lays the foundation for world-class climate science which is reflected in the contributions to the official symposium and the user workshop in February 2013 on the occasion of DKRZ’s anniversary. The following article will briefly review the exciting first 25 years of DKRZ.