One of the most powerful computers in the world was launched on Friday at the Zuse Institute in Berlin.
The computer, which has been named Lise, offers scientists from all over northern Germany highly complex services together with her twin sister Emmy in the city of Goettingen, the Federal Ministry of Research and the Berlin Senate Chancellery said on Friday.
The approximately 30-million-euro (33-million-dollar) system has a peak output of 16 quadrillion calculations per second, or 16 petaflops. That would put it in 13th place in the list of the 500 fastest supercomputers in the world.
The system in two locations was named after the physicist Lise Meitner (1878-1968) and the mathematician Emmy Noether (1881-1935).
The two computers will in the future be available to scientists from research institutions in the states of Berlin, Brandenburg, Bremen, Hamburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein.
They are useful for highly complex calculations on weather, climate and the environment as well as the development of effective drugs or new materials.
Half of the funding is being provided by the Federal Ministry of Research and the northern German federal states. In 2001, they joined forces to form an alliance to promote high performance computing.
Most recently, in drug research, a Berlin-based team of mathematicians, chemists and physicians succeeded in completely developing a new painkiller using the twin computers.
Using mathematical models and simulations, researchers were able to predict how analgesic molecules contained in opiates act on the body. After successful simulations, the new drug is now in clinical trial, the researchers say.