[Hardware] Germany will build 2 new supercomputers: Hunter in 2025 and Herder in 2027

[Dean Ambrose™]

The race for supercomputing is not only so that countries can show off on the list of the World Top 500 that is published every year, but it is equipment that is very useful for the advancement of technology in all areas, whether in computing, medicine, weather forecasting and much more. And now good news comes from Germany, because they have reached an agreement to build two new supercomputers, first Hunter, which will arrive in 2025 and then Herder, which will be ready in 2027.

This all comes from a partnership between AMD, HPC and the University of Stuttgart in an effort to improve HPC and AI development in the region. At the moment the agreement involves two supercomputers, Hunter, whose design has already begun and is expected to be operational in 2025, and Herder, an exascale system whose deployment is scheduled for 2027.

Meet the two new German supercomputers
The goal of both Hunter and Herder is to improve HPC (High Performance Computing) and Artificial Intelligence capabilities, as well as high-performance data analysis (HDPA). The cost of these two supercomputers rises to about 115 million euros (estimated), and will be financed by several government organizations in yet another effort by Germany to become a technological superpower (remember that it is also subsidizing Intel factories in the country).

Starting with the first of these two supercomputers, named Hunter, it will have an HPE Cray EX4000 rack and inside it will accommodate 136 nodes interconnected with four high-performance HPE Slingshot interconnections. The system will use AMD Instinct MI300A accelerators, which combine both processor, GPU and HBM memory on a single chip. In total, it is estimated that this should provide a computing capacity of around 39 PetaFLOPS, which is a generous performance increase compared to the Hawk, the University of Stuttgart's current supercomputer, which provides around 26 PetaFLOPS.

As for Herder, for now there is no detailed information on the hardware it will mount, but since it is expected to be ready by 2027, it is assumed that they will wait to have the latest hardware available by then. Let's remember that in this case, Herder is an exascale supercomputer, and that means that it must be able to perform a minimum of 1 ExaFLOP or floating point operations per second. Generally, this type of supercomputers do not consist of a single rack, but rather many interconnected ones as you can see in the image above. Big words.

In any case, we must also mention the Jupiter supercomputer, currently under development and which will be the first exascale computer in the German country. Of course, Germany's investment in the development of technology is being monumental, so it will be interesting to see if these capabilities drive the country's (and Europe's) overall development process, especially in the field of AI.

AMD takes center stage
As we have mentioned before, the Germans have chosen AMD and its Instinct MI300A accelerators to assemble the first of these supercomputers, Hunter, giving great prominence to Lisa Su's signature.

These APUs (because they are actually APUs with CPU, GPU and HBM memory) have 8 cores and 16 Zen 4 architecture process threads for each CCD, and since they have 3 it means that each of them provides 24 cores and 48 process threads . It has 1 MB of L2 cache per core (i.e. 24 MB) and a separate cache pool (32 MB per CCD).

These accelerators integrate 153 billion transistors, have Zen 4 architecture for the CPU and CDNA 3 for the GPU, support up to 192 GB of HBM3 memory and have up to 8 chiplets + 8 memory stacks.

 

https://hardzone.es/noticias/equipos/alemania-superordenadores-hunter-herder/