Application-Oriented Technology Development

To strengthen its competence in the (co-)development of new HPC architectures, JSC has established a new group for application-oriented technology development. On 1 April 2011, Dirk Pleiter joined JSC and was simultaneously appointed professor for theoretical physics at the University of Regensburg. He has been involved in the development and deployment of several generations of machines optimized for lattice QCD simulations. The latest generation of such machines, QPACE (QCD Parallel Computing on the Cell Broadband Engine), was based on IBM PowerXCell 8i processors, which were interconnected by a custom network implemented on FPGAs. By means of a highly efficient implementation of the HPL benchmark by IBM and JSC, the architecture was proven to be particularly power-efficient and put QPACE in the number one spot on the Green500 list in 2009. Ever-more powerful new HPC technologies are emerging, providing ample opportunities for future architectures optimized for particular classes of applications.

(Contact: Prof. Dr. Dirk Pleiter, ext. 9327)

from JSC News No. 194, April 2011