Hardware – BayernKI

Photonic computer for AI use cases at LRZ

At LRZ in Garching, a photonic computer for AI use cases was put into operation in an HPC environment for the first time worldwide. The Native Processing Server (NPS) from German start-up Q.ANT uses light instead of electrons for computing and therefore does not require energy-intensive cooling. Through parallel processing at different wavelengths, the technology promises high computing power combined with high energy-efficiency…

LRZ: Blue Lion based on Vera Rubin chip architecture

LRZ is set to deploy the Blue Lion supercomputer, powered by NVIDIA’s upcoming Vera Rubin architecture, as NVIDIA announced during ISC in June 2025. This system combines the Rubin GPU and Vera CPU, forming a superchip designed for real-time, large-scale scientific computing. Blue Lion aims to deliver approximately 30 times the performance of its predecessor, SuperMUC-NG, facilitating advanced research in areas like climate modeling, physics, and AI…

EU Commissioner Henna Virkkunen visits AI Factory HammerHAI

On July 7, 2025, Henna Virkkunen, Executive Vice-President of the European Commission for Technological Sovereignty, Security and Democracy, visited the High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS) as part of her tour of European “AI factories” established by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking. The visit spotlighted HammerHAI, Germany’s first AI factory—launched in December 2024 and coordinated by HLRS along with partners such as the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre…

Helma is named after Wilhelmine, Margravine of Brandenburg-Bayreuth (1709–1758), co-founder of the University of Erlangen in 1743 (Image: Giulia Iannicelli, FAU)

NHR@FAU GPU cluster “Helma” hits #51 in the 65th Top500 list

The 65th Top500 list was released today at the ISC High Performance 2025 Conference in Hamburg, Germany. The list ranks the 500 fastest supercomputers in the world using the “High Performance LINPACK” benchmark.

Helma, NHR@FAU’s GPU supercomputer, was recently expanded with another 96 nodes for a total of 768 H100 and H200 GPUs. We are thrilled to announce that Helma now ranks 51st in the current list, with a…

“Helma” already records massive workload

Early access to the new “Helma” AI cluster at NHR@FAU is in progress and already recording high usage and massive workloads on the system. The first half of the supercomputer is currently in an intense testing phase and will go into open access in the first half of 2025. As the monitoring visualizes, the capacities of the system were almost fully used on January 7…

“Blue Lion”: HPE to build next supercomputer at LRZ

The new supercomputer “Blue Lion” is part of the German national HPC infrastructure of the Gauss Center for Supercomputing and will serve a wide range of research projects, combining classic simulations with artificial intelligence. Please read the press release of HPE. Blue Lion is scheduled to go live in early 2027 and deliver 30X faster performance…

Close-up of one of the racks in the Helma Cluster.

Early Access to Cluster “Helma” has started

The quieter days are just around the corner, but for the initial computing nodes of the Cluster Helma, work is just getting started: The first friendly users have now been given early access to the first part of the NHR@FAU high-performance computer, which is mainly intended to support AI research.

New NHR@FAU cluster “Helma” hits rank #79 in Top500 list

The 64th Top500 list was released today at the SC24 Conference in Atlanta, Georgia. It ranks the 500 fastest supercomputers in the world according to the “High Performance LINPACK” benchmark, which solves a large, dense system of linear equations.

A Megware employee delivers components of the new Helma cluster on a handcart.

First part of the Bayern-KI-Cluster “Helma” at NHR@FAU installed

The NHR@FAU is pleased to announce that the first four racks of the brand new BayernKI-Cluster “Helma” have arrived in the “Kältezentrale” at the south campus of the FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg. The cluster was delivered and installed by MEGWARE from Chemnitz, Germany…

Category: Hardware