Five years after acquiring its first supercomputer, Quriosity, BASF SE has replaced it with an even more powerful model to cope with increasingly more complex research and modelling projects.
Curiosity was already the largest computer of its kind when it came out, with 1.75 petaflops (a quadrillion of floating-point operations per second). The new machine offers 3 petaflops of power. You can find bigger computers out there, but not in the world of industrial chemical research.
“The computing capacity was no longer sufficient,” CTO Melanie Maas-Brunner said in a statement. “The complexity of our research projects and thus the demands on the supercomputer have increased.”
BASF says the sheer power of the new Curiosity will give it an edge in the lab as calculations that would have taken around a year previously, can be done in a few days. Whether it’s predicting what personal-care products would best work together or molecular modelling of crop-protection products, the supercomputer can handle it, the company said.