“Research using supercomputers contributes to a modern and sus-tainable society,” explained Professor Holger Hanselka, President of KIT. “With the help of supercomputers, research in key areas, such as energy, environment, mobility, and medicine, will find new solu-tions faster. HoreKa thus fits perfectly into KIT's strategy to make significant contributions to managing the challenges facing society.”
“High-performance computing stands for rapid developments. With their ever increasing peak performances, supercomputers are crucial to both leading-edge research and the development of innovative products and processes in key economic areas. Thanks to institutions like KIT, Baden-Württemberg is a European leader in supercomputing and internationally competitive in this area. It is not only the impressive computing power of the machines, but also the concentrated methodological expertise that enables our computer-assisted top-level research to achieve breathtaking results,” said Baden-Wuerttemberg Science Minister Theresia Bauer.
The new “Hochleistungrechner Karlsruhe” (German for Karlsruhe high-performance computer), HoreKa for short, is expected to be one of the ten most powerful computers in Europe in 2021 and will have a computing power of more than 17 PetaFLOPS - 17 quadrillion computing operations per second, which corresponds to the performance of more than 150,000 laptops.
The system will be available to scientists from all over Germany. Thanks to the new supercomputer, researchers in the areas of materials sciences, earth system science, energy and mobility research in engineering, life sciences and particle and astroparticle physics will be able to gain a more detailed understanding of highly complex natural and technical processes. Of course, HoreKa can also be used by scientists studying the SARS-CoV-2 virus and, thus, will contribute to fighting the COVID-19 disease.