About the Rechenzentrum Garching
The Rechenzentrum Garching (RZG) originated as the computing centre of the Max Planck Institute for Plasmaphysics (IPP) which was founded in 1960 by Werner Heisenberg and the Max Planck Society. Already in 1962 an IBM 7090 system was operated, the most powerful data processing system those days, designed for "large-scale scientific and technological applications".
As a joint computing centre of the IPP and the Max Planck Society, RZG offers services for Max Planck Institutes all over Germany. Since over four decades now key tasks provided by the RZG include: Supercomputing, data management/mass storage, and data acquisition.
Supercomputing
Supercomputing started in 1962 with an IBM 7090 system, followed by the installation of an IBM 360/91 system in 1969. In October 1979 the first vector system world-wide for basic research was installed, a Cray 1 system. This marked the evolvement of the vector technology which dominated supercomputing for nearly two decades with follow-up systems Cray XMP-24 in 1986 and Cray YMP-4 in 1991.
With the first German nCUBE2/64 system in 1991, exploration of the potential of the upcomping massively parallel processing (MPP) systems started.
Transition from vector to MPP technology occurred in 1995 with a Cray T3D/128 system, followed by a Cray T3E/128 system in October 1996 which was finally upgraded to 816 PEs in Feb 1998.
MPP based supercomputer technology was continued with an IBM Power4 based system with initial shipments in 2001 and the upgrade to a 3.8 TFlop/s system in 2002. The final upgrade to 5.2 TFlop/s was in December 2003. The Power4 nodes were connected by an HPS "Federation Switch" as a fast communication network.
RZG also hosted a 86-node IBM Power5-based p575 cluster.
In September 2007, the worldwide first IBM Blue Gene/P system (2 racks) was installed at the RZG. It was extended ito four racks in 2008, with a peak performance of 56 TFlop/s.
In spring 2008 an IBM Power6-based p575 system was installed with 125 TFlop/s peak.
Application support is given to Max Planck Institutes with high-end computing needs in fusion research, materials sciences, theoretical chemistry, polymer research, astrophysics, earth sciences and other fields.
Archive Systems
Large amounts of experimental data from the fusion devices of the IPP (ASDEX Upgrade, Wendelstein 7-AS, and, later, Wendelstein 7-X), satellite data of the MPI for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE), and data from supercomputer simulations are administered and stored at the RZG with high lifetimes.
The RZG developed archival and editing systems with tape migration (AMOS, later HADES). Such data have been used since beginning of the seventies. In the mid of the nineties Unix based systems have been introduced . These are continuously further developed by the RZG and contain experimental data over 20 years old.
Data Acquisition Systems for Fusion Experiments
Since 1998, the experimental data acquisition software development group for the Wendelstein 7-X fusion experiment and the current ASDEX Upgrade fusion experiment have been operating as part of RZG.
