His­to­ry

In the following you find milestones of the PC² in its 30 years of history.

April 2022
Inauguration of the new high-performance computing center (building X) and the HPC system Noctua 2

November 2020
Paderborn Center for Parallel Computing selected as National High-Performance Computing Center

October 2019
Start of the construction of the new HPC datacenter building X

September 2018
Inauguration of the Noctua 1 HPC system

July 2018
Installation of a 700 TFLOPS HPC system with 10.000 processor cores.

June 2017
German Council for Science and Humanities (Wissenschaftsrat) recommends funding for high-performance computing at Paderborn University: 25m€ for Noctua and a new computing center

March 2013
Inauguration of the OCuLUS (Owl CLUSter) HPC system

December 2012
Installation of a 200 TFLOPS HPC system with 10.000 processor cores.

July 2012
Installation of the GreenPAD system.

October 2011
Relocation to a new building on the main campus (building O)

August 2009
Installation of the Isilon storage system.

March 2008
Compute resource BisGrid-cluster available for D-Grid community BIS-Grid.

May 2007
D-Grid community project BIS-Grid started.

May 2006
Evaluation of Woodcrest systems in cluster environments for INTEL cooperation.

April 2006
Start of the project AssessGrid financed by the European Union.

September 2005
Start of the D-Grid project.

June 2005
Inauguration of the Arminius Cluster.

May 2005
Installation of the new hpcLine Arminius Cluster with more than 400 Intel Xeon / AMD Opteron processors and high performance visualization.

February 2005
Start of Zielvereinbarung "Visualisierung und Simulation"

October 2004
The 1992 Parsytec GigaCluster GCel moves from PC² to the Heinz-Nixdorf-MuseumsForum

June 2004
Start of HPC4U project financed by the European Union.

June 2004
Evaluation of InfiniBand cluster with Intel EM64T processors and PCI-Express

January 2004
Start of the DELIS project financed by the European Union.

November 2003
Evaluation of a server system with 4 processor Itanium2 for the INTEL cooperation

September 2003
Installation of InfiniBand-Cluster with 64 Itanium2 processors (128 Gbyte memory, 332 Gflop/s performance)

August 2003
Installation of a MyriNet-Cluster with 8 Xeon processors and 4 FPGA-cards dedicated for computer chess

May 2003
Evaluation of next generation MyriNet communication card

April 2003
Installation of AMD Opteron-Cluster with 8 Opteron processors (14 Gbyte memory, 22 Gflop/s performance)

November 2002
Installation of InfiniBand-Cluster with 8 Itanium2 processors (48 Gbyte memory, 32 Gflop/s peak performance)

August 2002
The conference Euro-Par 2002 is held at the PC²

February 2001
Upgrade of the hpcLine to 850 MHz processors

December 2000
Start of the Up-TV project financed by the European Union

November 2000
Evaluation of the IA-64 system for the Fujitsu-Siemens Computer corporation

September 2000
Connection to the G-Win. The high-speed network of the DFN for German universities and scientific institutes.

July 2000
The computer chess program P. ConNerS wins the 10th Grandmaster Chess Tournament in Lippstadt and ran on the PC2 hpcLine.

January 2000
Start of the IMM-TV project for multimedia TV systems.

January 2000
Start of the UNICORE Plus project

November 1999
PC2 is co-founder of the European Grid Forum

November 1999
inauguration of the hpcLine.

May 1999
Start of the BMBF financed project SCI-CL.

April 1999
PC2 starts a cooperation with Fujitsu Siemens Computer corporation.

February 1999
PC2 starts a cooperation with Hilti AG, Principality of Liechtenstein.

November 1998
Installation of the new hpcLine with 192 Pentium II processors (48 GByte memory, 86.4 GFlop/s peak performance).

June 1998
Installation of the 1 Gbit/s wide area network between Bielefeld and Paderborn

January 1998
Installation of a large SCI-Cluster with 64 PentiumII processors (8 GByte memory, 19.2 GFlop/s peak performance)

September 1997
Start of the ESPRIT project DYNAMITE: "Dynamic Task Migration Execution Environment",
Partners: ESI, Univ. Amsterdam, Genias Benelux

August 1997
Start of the UNICORE project: "Uniform Interface to Computing Resources"

April 1997
Connection to the 34 Mbit/s wide area network

February 1997
Start of the ESPRIT project PHASE: "A Pharmaceutical Application Server",
Partners: Merck, Novo Nordisk, EBI, NIMR, Oxford Molecular.

December 1996
Heterogeneous SCI-Cluster with 20 PentiumPro processors (Linux operating system)

August 1996
Inauguration of the Metacomputer Online Initiative

June 1996
PC2 User Workshop and Parallelitätstag

June 1996
Installation of the Parsytec CC-48 system (12.76 GFlop/s peak performance, 3 GByte memory, link speed: 1 Gbit/s)

January 1996
Start of the ESPRIT project MICA: "A Model for Industrial CFD Applications",
Partners: CHAM, INRIA, LSTM Erlangen, NTUA, UZ-LITEC, Storck-Comprimo, Hoogovens, Vattenfall, TU Lisbon, SMHI, CMR, BRE, WAT&B

November 1995
NRW Research Collaboration Metacomputingrunnout "Distributed High-Performance Computing" coordinated by PC2

July 1995
Beginning of the DFG Sonderforschungsbereich 376 Massive Parallelität: Algorithmen, Entwurfsmethoden, Anwendungen

May 1995
Upgrade of the Parsytec GC/PowerPlus to 192 processors
(7.9 GFlop/s, number 117 on international TOP 500 list; place 6 in Germany)

October 1994
Start of the ESPRIT project EUROPORT.

September 1994
Installation of the Parsytec GC/PowerPlus

May 1993
Conversion of about 5 Million postal codes for the credit card company Eurocard

May 1993
Installation of the 2 Mbit/s wide area network

January 1993
Start of the ESPRIT project GP-MIMD

November 1992
International Heinz Nixdorf Symposium "Parallel Architectures and their Efficient Use"

November 1992
Inauguration of the ZEUS consortium (Zentren EUropäischen Supercomputings)

September 1992
Constitutional meeting of the ZIAM GmbH

September 1992
Installation of the Parsytec GCel-1024 (1024 nodes, 4 GByte memory, number 259 in worldwide TOP 500 list, place 22 in Germany; largest Transputer system in Europe)

August 1992
Foundation of the NRW-Initiative "Parallele Datenverarbeitung" e.V.

June 1992
Workshop/Tutorial and Parallelitätstag

January 1992
Prof. Dr. B. Monien, chairman of the PC2, wins the prestigous Leibniz-Preis

December 1991
Start of the development of the Computing Center Software (CCS)

May 1991
Official opening of the Parsytec SuperCluster SC-320, the largest freely configurable Transputer system worldwide

April 1991
Constitutional meeting of the PC²

July 1986
Installation of the first Transputer system at Paderborn University