Many universities and non-university research institutes in German have local computing centres to meet their own needs. These are often funded by the in-house budget or the German Research Foundation. In addition, there are national high-performance computing centres in the NHR Alliance, currently totalling nine (as of December 2023), which also includes PC2. These make their supercomputers available to users from universities across the whole of Germany.
‘With “Noctua 2”, we have entered an entirely new dimension – we are now one of the top ten academic computing centres in Germany’, as Professor Christian Plessl, computer scientist and chair of the PC2 board, delightedly explains. Only the three national high-performance computing centres making up the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing consortium are larger.
However, the current size is not necessarily the final one: ‘We are already working on plans for “Noctua 3”’, Plessl reveals. This is because the X building newly constructed at Paderborn University for ‘Noctua 2’ was designed to offer twice as much space as is taken up by the current computer. The cooling and fire protection concepts, power supply, and office spaces are also conceived to enable expansion in stages. Sustainability played a major role in the building's construction: the electricity for ‘Noctua 2’ comes entirely from hydropower and is thus CO2-free. The hot-water cooling is extremely efficient and the waste heat is used to heat this and other buildings. The cooling units are all free of chlorofluorocarbons, which were previously often used as a cooling agent but are damaging to the ozone layer.