University Computing Centre

With the groundbreaking ceremony on May 16, 2019, Thuringia's Minister of Construction Birgit Keller and Thuringia's Minister of Science Wolfgang Tiefensee kicked off construction work on the new IT Service Center at Ilmenau University of Technology. On the one hand, the new building will be "home" to the previous university computer center and several other, previously decentralized IT areas. On the other hand, it will provide installation facilities for high-quality media technology installations and will also be one of the two locations of the IT Center of the Thuringian universities. In total, a good 2,000 square meters of usable space will be created, as well as 560 square meters of technical functional space. In addition to office space, this will primarily include machine rooms with servers, security areas, and operational rooms. Construction work is scheduled for completion by the end of 2022.

The IT center with its locations at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena and the Ilmenau University of Technology provides complementary IT services in a joint, coordinated and coordinated manner through specialization to support the ten Thuringian universities with their different orientations and sizes. The office is located at the TU Ilmenau.

To the IT Center

This project aims to consolidate and standardize the backup storage infrastructure of the three institutions - Ilmenau University of Technology, University of Erfurt, Bauhaus University Weimar. The goal is to increase availability and optimize disaster prevention, also through uniform administration and user interfaces.

Grant number 2019 FGI 0021

In June 2021, a GPU compute cluster was installed and put into user operation. GPUs from graphics giant NVIDIA are installed in the GPC cluster. If several GPUs, i.e. high-performance graphics processing units, which are particularly suitable for high-performance computing due to their architecture, are connected to form a cluster, their performance is multiplied.

In addition to the 320 CPU cores and 5 terabytes of main memory (RAM), the seven GPU servers contain a total of 36 NVIDIA A100 tensor-core GPUs with a total of 1.44 TB of graphics memory. Connected via a low-latency 200Gbit/s network, these GPUs allow efficient processing of even the largest data volumes. High-performance access to enormous amounts of data (here: millions of tiny files) is made possible by a customized GPU storage solution.

In addition to future research projects of the TU Ilmenau, highly ambitious current projects in the future field of artificial intelligence, such as the project "Engineering for Smart Manufacturing (E4SM)" funded by the Carl Zeiss Foundation or the inter-university project "ThurAI", which was launched at the beginning of April and funded by the Free State of Thuringia, will also benefit from this GPU cluster.

Press release: Commissioning of a graphics card cluster (GPU Cluster)

HPC Wiki TU Ilmenau: www.tu-ilmenau.de/hpc