QPACE - Quantum Chromodynamics Parallel Computing on the Cell

QPACE (Quantum Chromodynamics Parallel Computing on the Cell) is a massively parallel and scalable computer architecture optimized for lattice quantum chromodynamics (LQCD). It has been developed in cooperation between several academic institutions (SFB TR 55 under the leadership of the University of Regensburg) and the IBM development laboratory in Böblingen, Germany.

This system was taken out of operation on 4 October 2016. It will be replaced by a new modern and more energy-efficient system - called QPACE3 - in the last quarter of 2016.

The QPACE system is available for selected QCD projects.

Hardware Characteristics
4 Racks with 32 backplanes x 32 nodecards (total 1024) Nodecard: 1 IBM PowerXCell 8i processor plus 1 FPGA-based network processor Processors: 1024 PowerXCell 8i (8192 cores) Overall peak performance: 100 Teraflops Main memory: 4 TB (aggregate) Network: Three-dimensonal torus (6 GB/s) Network processor: FPGA-based Power consumption: 140 kW (aggregate) Power efficiency: 723 Megaflops/W (#1 Green500, SC09) Operating system: Scientific Linux 5.3 1 Login/Master node IBM e1350 Processortype: quad core Intel Xeon 1.6 GHz Processors: 2 (8 cores) Main memory: 2 Gbytes Disk capacity for user data: 72 TB Operating system: Scientific Linux 5.3 Internet address: jupace.fz-juelich.de