The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology’s (KIT) HoreKa 2 hybrid supercomputer is now operational.

Housed at the university’s KIT Campus North in Baden-Württemberg, southwestern Germany, the system cost €17 million ($19m) and will support climate, new materials, particle physics, energy, mobility, and AI research.

HoreKa 2 is the successor to HoreKa, the university’s 17 petaflops supercomputer that was inaugurated in 2021.

The new Lenovo-manufactured supercomputer has a peak performance of 33 petaflops.

The CPU partition uses Lenovo SD665 V3 servers featuring AMD Epyc 9655 ‘Turin’ CPUs, while the GPU partition is comprised of Lenovo ThinkSystem SC777 V4 servers, featuring Nvidia GB200 GPUs and interconnected by Nvidia’s NVLink networking technology.

HoreKa 2 also has 250TB of memory and a storage system based on IBM Storage Scale Systems (SSS 6000), with a two-tier architecture consisting of NVMe and HDD tiers.

The GPU partition is cooled using Lenovo’s Neptune liquid cooling technology, which utilizes hot water to ensure “particularly energy-efficient operation and free cooling all over the year.”

The university further stated that during the system’s development and procurement phases, performance and energy efficiency were given equal priority and, as a result, it claims that HoreKa 2 is one of the most energy-efficient supercomputers of its performance class worldwide – with power supply at KIT’s Campus North 100 percent based on renewables.

“HoreKa 2 strengthens the digital capabilities of KIT and combines cutting-edge research with a clear focus on sustainability. It will allow us to create the conditions necessary to conduct data-intensive research and run modern AI applications in an energy-efficient and sustainable manner,” said Professor Kora Kristof, VP of digitalization and sustainability at KIT.

“Researchers from nearly all disciplines will benefit from the new system,” added Professor Martin Frank, member of the Board of Directors of the KIT Scientific Computing Center (SCC). “With the new system, we are able to double the computing power for simulations and AI applications.”

In addition to unveiling its new supercomputer, last week KIT also announced plans to build an AI data center at Campus North. According to the university, the facility will cost an estimated €24 million ($27.2m) and be designed to support other higher education institutions, government organizations, and researchers.