Hawk, the latest and greatest supercomputer at the High-Performance Computing Center of the University of Stuttgart (HLRS), was inaugurated just a few months ago. Now, HLRS is offering an inside look at the supercomputer through an immersive virtual tour that allows anyone to walk around the large installation.

The walkthrough (Hawk-through?) is available here. Users can click or use their arrow keys to move themselves around the virtual space in their browser (or even on a virtual reality headset). The space is peppered with digitally added information points, and hovering over any of those will offer information about various aspects of Hawks hardware, facilities and operations. The tool also includes a measurement mode, a top-down floor plan view and a dollhouse view that allows for a holistic of the entire 3D mapped structure and its 44 cabinets.

We provide our computational resources to scientists all over Europe, Germany, and other industry users from certain domains like automotive and aeronautics, said Bastian Koller, managing director of HLRS, in one of the informational videos provided by the walkthrough. In AMD we found a good partner [], which goes beyond just buying simple hardware bits from them, but [also] being able to address the challenges and the problems of our customers in the best possible way by providing us [with the] best technology at this point in time. Koller expects that the collaboration will continue well into the future, helping HLRS to address issues like energy efficiency in supercomputing.

Hawk is an HPE Apollo 9000 system with 5,632 nodes spread across its 44 cabinets, each node carrying dual AMD Epyc Rome 7742 CPUs. The system also boasts 1.44 total petabytes of memory, a Mellanox InfiniBand HDR200 interconnect and 25 petabytes of disk storage. Overall, Hawk delivers around 26 peak petaflops enough to make it 3.5 more powerful than its predecessor at HLRS (Hazel Hen) and place it 35th on the most recent Top500 list of the worlds most powerful publicly ranked supercomputers.

Hawk expands the University of Stuttgarts already excellent research infrastructure with an additional flagship system, said Wolfram Ressel, rector of the University of Stuttgart, when Hawk was inaugurated in February. It will enable cutting edge academic and industrial research in a wide range of contexts where simulation and big data play important roles. In this way the new high-performance computer also makes an important contribution to realizing the University of Stuttgarts vision, Intelligent systems for a sustainable society.

To visit the virtual tour of Hawk, click here.

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Take a Virtual Tour of Hawk, the New HLRS Supercomputer - HPCwire