Heuking Kühn Lüer Wojtek supports GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung in development of a supercomputer

Dr. Stephan Witteler, Partner at the Frankfurt office of the law firm of Heuking Kühn Lüer Wojtek, and Christine Grau, LL.M., supported GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung (GSI) in Darmstadt on developing the “L-CSC” supercomputer. It was developed jointly with GSI at Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS) and Goethe University and will be used at GSI for simulations and computations in physical basic research. Costs amounted to about 2 million euros. Heuking Kühn Lüer Wojtek drafted the necessary research and development contracts and negotiated the final versions with the contracting party.

The supercomputer serves primarily for preparing experiments at the large international accelerator center FAIR (Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research), which is currently being built in Darmstadt. The technology used in connection with L-CSC will save 30 percent of energy, which, if this technology is used for commercial computer centers, would allow for enormous savings in cost and CO2 emissions.

The supercomputer at GSI is still being built. In the worldwide “Top500” speed ranking, it is currently placed at no. 168 with 316.7 trillion arithmetic operations per second (about three thousand times faster than a normal office PC). In the final configuration, L-CSC will even offer a top computing performance of 1.7 petaflops at twice the accuracy, thus 1.7 quadrillion available floating-point operations per second, making it the fourth-fastest supercomputer in Germany.

Counsel to GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung
Heuking Kühn Lüer Wojtek:
Dr. Stephan Witteler,
Christine Grau, LL.M (both IT Law/Contract Law), both Frankfurt