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2025-09-29: New GPUs and Partitions

The HPC Gateway initiative of the Helmholtz society aims to open access to the Helmholtz Association's world-leading HPC infrastructure for businesses and connects them with AI experts. The initiative particularly supports projects in the areas of AI, digital twins, and HPC-based innovations. See Helmholtz press release for more information.

New GPU hardware has been funded by HPC Gateway, and became now part of the Maxwell cluster. The hardware is specifically serving industry to support and initiate AI activities. The hardware comprises 8 nodes with 4xH200-NVL and 1.5TB of memory each.

  • The hpcgwgpu partition is dedicated to co-operations with industry and not available otherwise.
  • The compgpu partition makes the precious hardware available to all Maxwell users.

Jobs in the comgpu partition are (not suprisingly) subject to preemption (by jobs in the hpcgwgpu partition). However, we expect the preemption-rate to be much lower than in the allgpu-partition, particularly in the early phase of the HPC Gateway project.

Due to the small number of nodes, limits apply in the comgpu partition:

  • maximum number of concurrently running jobs per user: 2
  • maximum number of jobs per user: 2

Please note: due to the nature of the HPC Gateway project, only software allowing commercial use is available in on HPC Gateway hardware. Tools like Matlab, Mathematica, Ansys, IDL or similar are not available in partitions hpcgwgpu or comgpu.

Acknowledgements of the Maxwell cluster and - if appropriate - the HPC Gateway project in your publications would be greatly appreciated.

2025-09-01: Solaris subcluster in Maxwell

the solaris sub-cluster in Maxwell serves in particular non-demanding batch and interactive jobs.

We have recently added a bit of hardware and a number of services to solaris.

Hardware

solaris is kind of a retirement home for old hardware. Selected pieces of hardware have been retired in Maxwell, but can still serve some purpose in the solaris subcluster. We habe recently added P100 GPU nodes to solaris, as well as ARM-processors.

The P100 GPUs are ancient, and not supported with CUDA 13, but can still be used for developments and graphical applications suffering from memory and core limitations on the display nodes.

The ARM cpus are of type ARM ampere Neoverse-N1. The ARM processor has an entirely different architecture, and x86-software will hence not work. However, the ARM processors might still be useful for developments and tests.

Services

solaris meanwhile also comes with a portal exposing the same services as the Maxwell portal. It offers in particular a dedicated jupyterhub supporting all hardware platforms (cpus, gpus, arm).

  • in science
  • 1 min read

Illuminating Rembrandt’s Chiaroscuro in The Night Watch: the painting process of Van Ruytenburch’s costume

Abstract\n This study examines Rembrandt’s use of chiaroscuro to depict the costume of Lieutenant Willem Van Ruytenburch, a prominently lit figure in The Night Watch (1642). As part of Operation Night Watch, the painting was analyzed using noninvasive imaging techniques, including reflectance imaging spectroscopy (RIS), macroscopic X-ray powder diffraction (MA-XRPD), and macroscopic X-ray fluorescence (MA-XRF). These methods enabled the mapping of the artist’s pigment palette, which includes lead white, lead-tin yellow, ochres, vermilion, arsenic sulfide pigments, red lakes, smalt, and azurite. Rembrandt applied these pigments in a consistent, systematic way, combining them in groups to achieve pictorial unity. Notably, arsenic-based pigments were used to capture the warm reflections of gold threads, unique to Van Ruytenburch’s costume. MA-XRPD also identified degradation products—mimetite, weddellite, and palmierite—associated with the original pigments. These results provide new insights into Rembrandt’s modus operandi and inform understanding of the current condition and implications for its conservation.

npj Herit. Sci.

Nouchka De Keyser et al.

2025-07-13: pixi

pixi has been added. pixi is a powerfull package manage and an excelent alternative to conda, pip et al.. It's particularly great to package and deploy complete environments in arbitrary locations. Added a thin container around a self-extracting pixi package allows to manage and version environments through the container registry.

2025-06-25: power-saving until 2025-07-31

Update: powersaving measures have finished

The maxwell cluster is running at reduced capacities Due to power-saving requirements. Until end of July, about 250 compute nodes are reserved daily for the time 11:00-15:00, and are being powered off for the duration.

The reserved nodes will not accept any long running jobs colliding with the reservations. Jobs fitting inbetween daily reservations will not be impacted.

  • in science
  • 2 min read

Active energy compression of a laser-plasma electron beam

Abstract\n Radio-frequency (RF) accelerators providing high-quality relativistic electron beams are an important resource enabling many areas of science, as well as industrial and medical applications. Two decades ago, laser-plasma accelerators1 that support orders of magnitude higher electric fields than those provided by modern RF cavities produced quasi-monoenergetic electron beams for the first time2–4. Since then, high-brightness electron beams at gigaelectronvolt (GeV) beam energy and competitive beam properties have been demonstrated from only centimetre-long plasmas5–9, a substantial advantage over the hundreds of metres required by RF-cavity-based accelerators. However, despite the considerable progress, the comparably large energy spread and the fluctuation (jitter) in beam energy still effectively prevent laser-plasma accelerators from driving real-world applications. Here we report the generation of a laser-plasma electron beam using active energy compression, resulting in a performance so far only associated with modern RF-based accelerators. Using a magnetic chicane, the electron bunch is first stretched longitudinally to imprint an energy correlation, which is then removed with an active RF cavity. The resulting energy spread and energy jitter are reduced by more than an order of magnitude to below the permille level, meeting the acceptance criteria of a modern synchrotron, thereby opening the path to a compact storage ring injector and other applications.

Nature

P. Winkler et al.
  • in science
  • 1 min read

A proteome-wide structural systems approach reveals insights into protein families of all human herpesviruses

AbstractStructure predictions have become invaluable tools, but viral proteins are absent from the EMBL/DeepMind AlphaFold database. Here, we provide proteome-wide structure predictions for all nine human herpesviruses and analyze them in depth with explicit scoring thresholds. By clustering these predictions into structural similarity groups, we identified new families, such as the HCMV UL112-113 cluster, which is conserved in alpha- and betaherpesviruses. A domain-level search found protein families consisting of subgroups with varying numbers of duplicated folds. Using large-scale structural similarity searches, we identified viral proteins with cellular folds, such as the HSV-1 US2 cluster possessing dihydrofolate reductase folds and the EBV BMRF2 cluster that might have emerged from cellular equilibrative nucleoside transporters. Our HerpesFolds database is available at https://www.herpesfolds.org/herpesfolds and displays all models and clusters through an interactive web interface. Here, we show that system-wide structure predictions can reveal homology between viral species and identify potential protein functions.

Nat Commun

Timothy K. Soh et al.