Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and BASF will jointly to develop a supercomputer for industrial chemical research at BASF’s Ludwigshafen headquarters this year.
HPE said the new supercomputer, based on the HPE Apollo 6000 systems, will drive the digitalization of BASF’s research and answer complex questions and reduce the time to obtain results from several months to days across all research areas.
“The supercomputer will promote the application and development of complex modeling and simulation approaches, opening up completely new avenues for our research at BASF,” said Martin Brudermueller, vice chairman and chief technology officer at BASF.
As part of BASF’s digitalization strategy, the company plans to expand its capabilities to run virtual experiments with the supercomputer. The super computer will help BASF to reduce time to market and costs by simulating processes on catalyst surfaces more precisely or accelerating the design of new polymers with pre-defined properties.
HPE CEO Meg Whitman said: “We expect this supercomputer to help BASF perform prodigious calculations at lightning fast speeds, resulting in a broad range of innovations to solve new problems and advance our world.”
BASF will gain from the supercomputer – powered by Intel Xeon processors, Intel Omni-Path Fabric and HPE management software – that will act as a single system with an effective performance of more than 1 Petaflop reducing the processing time.
“Intel Omni-Path Architecture is specifically designed to deliver outstanding performance while scaling cost-effectively from entry-level high performance computing clusters to larger clusters with 10,000 nodes or more — offering a significant advantage on both fronts,” said Barry Davis, general manager, Accelerated Workload Group, Intel.
HPE said the supercomputer, which will consist of several hundred computer nodes, will leverage HPE Apollo Systems to give customers simplified administration efficiencies and flexibility to match their solutions to the workload and lower their total cost of ownership.
