Accelerating AI with HPC

You have a great AI model, but are you hitting a wall? Whether it's training times that take days on a local machine or high costs on commercial cloud providers, your research needs a platform that scales. With a dense network of public high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure, even with systems in the TOP500-ranking, the state of North Rhine-Westphalia offers its researchers ideal conditions for compute-intense research – free of charge!

HPC.nrw is here to help you find the resources and support that you need.

What is HPC?

HPC provides hardware at the largest scale: servers with many CPU cores (often 96+), large system memory (hundreds of GB up to 3 TB), and datacenter GPUs with large VRAM (e.g., NVIDIA H200-class; 141GB). These servers are connected via high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnects (typically 100–400+ Gbit/s) and backed by high-throughput shared storage (many TB per project, often far more).

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Are you ready to scale up?

The future of AI is built on HPC. State-of-the-art machine learning, e.g. for large language models or molecular simulations and structure predictions – requires high parallelisation, distributed memory, and high-throughput data access. In addition, by running on centralized infrastructure, you are not only faster but also more efficient, dramatically reducing the energy footprint of your research. Many of the HPC centers in NRW are in the TOP500 green and offer significantly better energy efficiency compared to departmental systems.

Is my workload suitable for HPC?

Almost all HPC systems in NRW are designed for users at all levels, and you can start small with the kinds of resources that resemble your private laptop. Moreover, containerization lets you build repeatable environments that exactly mimic your development environment. From there you can scale to bigger problems.

Learn how to get started

Where do I get HPC resources?

f you are a researcher from an academic institution in NRW, there are most likely resources provided by your home institution. These offerings usually require very little formal applications. Find out where to apply or click on your site on the map below.

For researchers with greater computational demand, the NHR centers, the AI service center WestAI, and the Jülich Supercomputing Centre, offer resources with higher amounts.

Where do I get support?

HPC.nrw is here to help you get started and when you get stuck:

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