RESEARCH
No less than three supercomputers for European research were unveiled on 26 May in Jülich in a ceremony attended by the Federal Minister for Education and Research, Prof. Dr. Annette Schavan, and the Prime Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, Dr. Jürgen Rüttgers. The three computers include the supercomputer JUGENE, which with a computing power of one petaflop/s, that is to say a trillion arithmetic operations per second, is currently the fastest computer in Europe.
Researchers from all disciplines make use of supercomputers in order to discover how the climate is changing, how proteins are folded in cells, how new semiconductors function or how fuel cells can be improved. Jülich’s approach is to provide a system of complementary computers with a suitable platform for all applications.
"The new Jülich supercomputer will be able to perform a trillion arithmetic operations per second, known as a petaflop/s for short," explained the Director of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre, Prof. Dr. Dr. Thomas Lippert. "In doing so, JUGENE makes use of the most energy-efficient computer technology currently available," added Lippert.
The roughly 72,000 processors in the new supercomputer will be accommodated in 72 water-cooled racks. The computer's storage capacity is around 144 terabytes. JUGENE will be used for computationally intensive, so-called highly scalable projects from all over Europe. Together with the other Jülich supercomputers, it will have access to around 6 petabytes of hard-drive storage. This corresponds to the storage capacity of more than a million DVDs. Funding of the computer of the type IBM Blue Gene / P is being shared between the Federal Government and the state of North Rhine-Westphalia as part of the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing.
The second supercomputer JUROPA is based on a cluster configuration of NovaScale servers from the French computer specialist Bull, and on blade servers from the American company Sun with Intel Nehalem processors.
The third member of the group is the first computer dedicated to European fusion research. Fusion researchers intend to use the HPC-FF supercomputer to better understand the complex mechanisms in the hot fusion matter, the plasma, that reaches a temperature of 100 million degrees Celsius inside the ITER fusion reactor. Supercomputing is, for example, absolutely indispensable for understanding the turbulent processes that determine the extraction of energy from the plasma.
Further information on JUGENE
Technical data on JUGENE
Further information on HPC-FF
Technical data on JUROPA and HPC-FF
