The increased performance is primarily required in the heart of the building: the server room, which can accommodate a total of 80 server cabinets in which numerous computers and graphics cards run in continuous operation. “With our new Data Center, we are responding to the constantly growing demand for computing power that comes with our own scientific activities in the field of artificial intelligence,” explains the Scientific Director of the HZDR, Prof. Sebastian M. Schmidt. “On the other hand, with the inauguration we are taking the step towards becoming a supra-regional service provider for AI research. We are involved in a new generation of AI foundation models that we are developing together with our partners in the Helmholtz Association.”
These so-called foundation models are AI applications that are designed to help make sense of the ever-increasing amounts of data – the basic prerequisite for fully exploiting their potential. Through targeted training with extensive data and the use of generative AI, they should be able to understand complex relationships on the basis of learned patterns, generate new relationships and make predictions. This makes them significantly more powerful and flexible than conventional AI models. This means, for example, that climate and environmental data can be more closely networked or medical diagnoses improved. With the opening of the Data Center, an HPC system costing around one million euros will go into operation in the first stage. Further capacities worth more than 3 million euros will be installed as early as the beginning of 2025.
Saxony’s strong role in the transformation process
The research center is thus making an important contribution to society in order to tackle the opportunities and challenges of AI, as Dr. Andreas Handschuh, State Secretary at the Saxon Ministry of Science, underlines: “With its new Data Center, the HZDR is creating an additional hotspot for high-performance computing, which will strengthen Saxony’s international visibility as a research location in the field of AI. Thanks to outstanding facilities such as the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (ScadsAI), the Center for Advanced Systems Understanding at the HZDR (CASUS) and the recently founded BioAI department, the Free State of Saxony is one of the leading centers of AI research in Germany. This puts us in an excellent position to provide significant impetus to the transformation process that artificial intelligence is triggering in science, industry and everyday life.”
The HZDR is solving one of the biggest problems of high-performance computing – the enormous amount of waste heat emitted – with a modern cooling system that improves the eco-balance compared to the old data center. The racks initially transfer the heat to a water cooling system via heat exchangers. Some of the waste heat is used to heat the building via a heat pump, while the rest is cooled via the outside air. This is a simple and ingenious method of operation, but it only works if the outside temperature does not exceed 30 degrees. On days that are too hot, compression chillers are also switched on.
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Further links
👉 www.hzdr.de
Photo: Oliver Killig/HZDR
