Maxwell Cluster

The Maxwell Cluster is the computing platform at DESY (Hamburg) for Photon Science data analysis, GPU accelerated computations (AI), High Performance Computing and scientific computing in general. The cluster serves myriads of applications and scientific fields.

Please read the Documentation to get started.

The Maxwell Cluster has all the typical characteristics of a HPC platform, but differs quite a bit from traditional HPC.

Features

• Fast cluster file systems: see storage for more information
• Fast network: information about the network infrastructure and topology
• Vast computational resources: detailed information about available hardware, CPUs, GPUs, and other specs
• Software support: a wide range of scientific applications are preinstalled and supported on the cluster

Terms of use

The sole purpose of the Maxwell Cluster is to support scientific applications. We aim to make that as simple as possible. The cluster is on the other hand a very substantial investment. Efficient use of resources is hence a key concern, which implies certain rules who can use the cluster for what kind of applications. First Steps explains the details and should get you started.

In order to provide high performance, stable, reliable and secure services we have to monitor resources and gather information about systems and processes. Please consult the data protection page and data privacy policy for more information.

Contact

For all questions which are clearly related to the maxwell cluster, please contact maxwell.service@desy.de. For all other inquiries uco@desy.de is your prime choice. There are a few more relevant contact points depending of the nature of the question and your affiliation. Access to group owned resources in Maxwell is for example managed by the groups namespace administrators. The contacts and services page gives a quick overview.

Citing and acknowledging use of the Maxwell Cluster

We currently don't have a cite-able reference for the Maxwell Cluster. However, if the cluster was an important asset in your research, we'd be grateful for an acknowledgement; it helps to keep the cluster funded appropriately. To cite or acknowledge the use of the cluster you could add a line like "This research was supported in part through the Maxwell computational resources operated at Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY, Hamburg, Germany" to the acknowledgments. Great examples can be found in the Science section.