Supercomputer HoreKa inaugurated at SCC

Prof. Corinna Hoose presented first simulations run on HoreKa and pushed the start button together with Minister Theresia Bauer, VP Prof. Oliver Kraft and SCC director Prof. Martin Frank.
C. Hoose’s presentation during the HoreKa inauguration

The new supercomputer “HoreKa” (short for “Hochleistungsrechner (high-performance computer) Karlsruhe”) of the Steinbuch Centre for Computing (SCC) at KIT is among the 15 fastest computers in Europe and among the 13 computers with the highest energy efficiency worldwide. On July 30, 2021, it was officially handed over to the scientific community by Theresia Bauer, Baden-Württemberg Minister of Science, Research, and the Arts. The new machine has a peak capacity of 17 PetaFLOPS and is a hybrid system with nearly 60.000 Intel CPUs and 668 NVDIA GPUs. The system is accessible for scientists from all German universities upon submission of compute time proposals within the National High Performance Computing Center at KIT (NHR@KIT). Earth System Sciences are a focal area of NHR@KIT. As the previous generations of supercomputers at SCC, HoreKa will be an important workhorse for IMK-TRO’s groups working with numerical models of weather and climate.

KIT’s new supercomputer HoreKa

 

 

 

Prof. Dr. Corinna Hoose (IMK-TRO) was an invited speaker at the inauguration event. In her presentation, she showed results from simulations of clouds in a changing atmosphere, among others preliminary simulations of a supercell (intense and long-living thunderstorm) conducted by Dr. Christian Barthlott during the pilot phase of HoreKa. The case study was based on a deep convective cloud leading to severe hail in the city of Rottenburg am Neckar during the Swabian MOSES field campaign, such that comprehensive observations are available (https://www.atmohub.kit.edu/305.php). Simulations with the ICON model at 1 km grid spacing (higher than the operational configuration) successfully reproduced the storm track, hail at the ground and even the mid-level rotation of the cell. This case will be the basis for further studies investigating the processes responsible for the supercell formation in the future.

 

 

Sources: press releases for HoreKa’ inauguration (https://www.kit.edu/kit/english/pi_2021_071_supercomputer-inaugurated-at-kit.php) and for NHR@KIT (https://www.kit.edu/kit/english/pi_2020_101_kit-will-be-center-for-national-supercomputing.php)