High-performance compute cluster

• Term: Funded in 2026
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 569285254

At the Technical University of Munich’s School of Life Sciences, data processing, analysis, and machine learning tasks cover all aspects of the life sciences under the School’s “one health” agenda. Indeed, data science and machine learning in the life sciences have become the norm for any research project, making it crucial to provide access to suitable computing resources. With high-performance computing solutions, even large user groups can share computing resources effectively and balance resources at times of peak activity that naturally differ between research groups. Until now, most computational resources available at the campus have been installed on-site and are difficult to share and maintain. Also, most resources lack the GPU capacity to work with state-of-the-art deep learning models. Furthermore, the School has recently appointed several new professors with a focus on bioinformatics, computational biology and Earth observation, whom together have urgent need for novel and sustainable computational resources. Notably, existing hardware at the campus used by previously established groups is no longer adequate: it does not meet state-of-the-art requirements, and most hardware has reached or is close to reaching its end of service. In this situation, the School of Life Sciences has the bold vision to completely restructure our computation landscape, allowing us to remain at the forefront of scientific discovery, where AI will play a decisive role. By installing a compute cluster at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, we will ensure professional service, sustainable and climate-friendly operating conditions, and -most importantly - we will create synergies between research groups as all hardware will be unified under a jointly operated workflow and job management system. The planned Life Science Compute Cluster will be suited for a wide range of tasks, catering to small data processing tasks as well as the training and adaptation of highly complex deep learning models. As a shared infrastructure, it will simplify collaborative and interdisciplinary projects at an entirely new level. Thus, the Life Science Compute Cloud will be instrumental for the success of the newly established groups at the School of Life Sciences, and also enable innovation for the entire campus. The cluster will be hosted, managed, and supported by the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre. It will directly support 15 research groups that can share their resources with each other and with other researchers at the campus, thus creating considerable synergies that will allow us to secure the leading role of the Technical University of Munich in life-science-related data science.

• DFG Programme: Major Research Instrumentation
• Major Instrumentation: Hochdurchsatz-Rechencluster
• Instrumentation Group: 7040 Vektorrechner
• Applicant Institution: Technische Universität München (TUM)
• Leader: Professor Dr. Markus List