BASF upgraded to a new supercomputer at its Ludwigshafen site to be used for research and development. The new supercomputer has three petaflops of computing power, replacing the existing supercomputer with 1.75 petaflops.
“Digital technologies are among the most important instruments to further expand our research and development capabilities,” said Melanie Maas-Brunner, Ph.D., member of the board of executive directors and CTO, BASF.
As one example, she noted that above-average computing power is required these days to work out the most promising polymer structures from thousands of possibilities. “Over the past five years, we have worked very successfully worldwide with our supercomputer Quriosity. It enabled us to considerably shorten the development time for innovative molecules and chemical compounds and thus accelerate the market launch of new products,” said Maas-Brunner. “But the computing capacity was no longer sufficient. Moreover, the complexity of our research projects and thus the demands on the supercomputer have increased. We therefore decided to invest in a new high-performance computer.”
The new supercomputer was manufactured by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and works with AMD processors (CPUs). BASF says its new BASF supercomputer, named Quriosity like its predecessor, is the world’s largest supercomputer used in industrial chemical research.
In addition to its own on-site supercomputer, BASF also plans to use cloud computing power.
“This hybrid solution offers us the best possible technical and operational flexibility,” said Maas-Brunner. “It allows us to handle requests requiring exceptionally large processing power as well as work on special tasks that our own supercomputer is not designed for.”