Photos: Germany's Leibniz supercomputer

The Leibniz supercomputer is a two-year-old Silicon Graphics (SGI) 4700, and is part of a planned European Computer centre. Within this there is a Grid project, and that extends out to the rest of the world. There are three national supercomputers within Germany.

"We need to move this with one voice," Hegering says of the European projects. "Within days we are signing a memorandum of understanding between these groups. We want to boost the science through understanding."

The framework for the Leibniz supercomputer is eight of these sets of servers. The basic components are Intel Itanium 2, single-socket, dual-core servers, and there are 1,024 processor cores in a single row. Counting a CPU as one, you get the advertised total of 4,096 units.

In performance terms, it is rated for 26.2 trillion flops (floating point instructions per second) but it is now going through an upgrade that will more than double its performance, according to Hegering.

There have been challenges, not least SGI's lurch into Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection soon after the LRZ bought the supercomputer.

"You ask, was SGI the right choice in view of what happened to the company?" says Hegering. "At that time you could not forsee the soundness of the enterprise. I could not forsee Chapter 11. But, you know, that did not affect us at all."