High Performance Computing Infrastructure
Flow and combustion simulations are extremely complex. The institute uses several high-performance computing clusters for these calculations.
The two high-performance computers CARA in Dresden and CARO at the DLR site in Göttingen can be used for the simulations. The large-scale research facility CARA (Computer for Advanced Research in Aerospace) is primarily used to carry out numerical simulations. The CARA HPC cluster has 2,720 nodes, each equipped with two AMD EPYC processors and 32 computing cores, 112 nodes each with two AMD EPYC processors and 64 computing cores, and 10 nodes each with four NVIDIA A100 GPUs. The system is water-cooled and has a power consumption of up to 1.2 megawatts. The storage components are divided into 16.5 petabytes of HDD and 0.6 petabytes of SSD. CARA has a maximum computing power of 3.2 quadrillion operations per second.
The high-performance computer CARO (Computer for Advanced Research in Aerospace) was only put into operation in July 2022. Among other things, this computer is intended to accelerate the introduction of new technologies for more economical, environmentally friendly and safer flying. To this end, hardware components (AMD processors) were selected that enable the best possible utilisation through simulation codes developed at DLR. These simulations include all the properties and components of an aircraft on the basis of highly accurate physical and mathematical models. They are a prerequisite for the virtual development, testing, operation and certification of aircraft.
The high-performance computing (HPC) cluster CARO achieves a performance that currently ranks among the top 150 in the list of the 500 fastest computer systems in the world. CARO achieved a computing power of 3460 TeraFLOPS - i.e. 3,460 trillion calculations in one second. By comparison, an average PC achieves around 300 billion calculations per second and is therefore around 10,000 times slower. The institute can also utilise external high-performance computers such as the HLRS, the JSC or the LRZ.