C A S E S T U D Y
HELMHOLTZ MUNICH PARTNERS WITH NTT ON FUTURE- READY DATA CENTRE FOR SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING
Dr Alf Wachsmann, Head of Scientific IT, Helmholtz Munich
Facing space and cooling limitations at its on-premises site, Helmholtz Munich moved its HPC cluster, including 360 GPUs, to NTT Global Data Centers ' Munich 2 colocation facility. The result is a greener, more flexible setup and a business case showing the advantages of renting. Dr Alf Wachsmann, Head of Scientific IT, Helmholtz Munich, tells us more.
Medical research requires a powerful IT infrastructure. Helmholtz Munich has relied on NTT DATA’ s expertise for many years. Moving its server infrastructure – including the high-performance computing( HPC) cluster and 360 GPUs – to the NTT Global Data Centers( NTT GDC) Munich 2 colocation site laid the foundation for efficient next-level scientific computing. Compared with its on-premises data centre, Helmholtz Munich benefits from this economically sound and significantly more sustainable solution.
Business need: Strengthening biomedical research capabilities with a future-proof high-performance data centre
Modern research increasingly relies on high-performance computing power. At Helmholtz Munich, the top priority is processing the majority of its scientific data on dedicated in-house infrastructure.
Relying on cloud-based resources is not an option – only a few dedicated research tasks that exceed its own computing power are performed on national resources such as the supercomputer in Jülich, Germany. As scientific computing and AI-driven applications have continued to advance, the demand for scalable computational acceleration has increased steadily. In life sciences research – where traditional CPU-based IT must work alongside high-performance GPU computing – this development has led to the deployment of an outstanding onsite HPC cluster.
However, the existing data centre had reached its limits in terms of space, and energy-efficient operations could no longer be ensured. GPUs – with their massive parallel processing power – require far more electrical capacity per rack than CPUs and the resulting heat output exceeded the centre’ s cooling design.
To maintain both sustainability and efficiency, a modern, future-ready solution was needed. The midterm plan to switch from air cooling to liquid cooling was another core technical requirement. Internal cost-benefit analyses strongly favoured moving to a colocation data centre. This was when the IT department began looking for a trusted partner to tackle Helmholtz Munich’ s current and future challenges.
“ With a total of 300 HPC servers – 100 of them equipped with 360 GPUs – we are among the leading IT clusters worldwide,” said Dr Alf Wachsmann, Head of Scientific
IT, Helmholtz Munich.“ NTT Global Data Centers now provides us with a highperformance, efficient and future-oriented data centre infrastructure. Through joint projects, we benefit from their extensive expertise in data centre design and liquid cooling. Their strong commitment to sustainable energy usage and the short distance to the Munich 2 site further convinced us.”
Solution: Colocation data centre enables resilient and sustainable next-level IT infrastructure
Working on a long-term project with NTT DATA to optimise its core IT infrastructure, Helmholtz Munich evaluated several options and ultimately decided to enter into another strategic collaboration within the NTT Group. The new Helmholtz Munich data centre is now located at the NTT GDC’ s Munich 2 site only 10km from the association.
Helmholtz Munich drives world-class medical research, exploring critical questions such as how climate change affects human health. It goes without saying that environmental compatibility was a decisive factor that guided Helmholtz Munich when selecting its colocation provider. NTT GDC’ s Munich
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