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The Supercomputing Department procures and operates supercomputers and supports scientists in efficiently using these machines.

The most powerful system being operated is a supercomputer system by SGI which has 13,000 compute cores offering a peak performance of 147 TeraFlop/s.  This computer is one part of the northern german supercomputer HLRN.  A second part of the same kind is installed at Regionales Rechenzentrum für Niedersachsen in Hannover.

Consultants from physics and material science, chemistry and bioinformatics as well as earth system research and engineering science provide advice to scientists from Berlin and all other members of HLRN on planning and running large scale computing projects.

The second compute system being operated is a Linux cluster with 80 nodes connected via Infiniband.  The cluster is used for distributed Grid applications mostly from the german Grid initiative D-Grid.

The department also manages the Berlin Research Area Information Network BRAIN and hosts the BRAIN office.  The BRAIN network connects 140 sites from over 40 scientific and cultural institutions in Berlin via optical fibres of a total length of 2,000 km.