JUQUEEN - Jülich's New Green Flagship
As a result of the strong collaboration between JSC and IBM in the Exascale Innovation Centre, Forschungszentrum Jülich procured an IBM Blue Gene/Q system, known as JUQUEEN. Systems of this type are currently the most energy-efficient supercomputers according to the Green 500 List (http://www.green500.org). The machine is being installed for researchers at Jülich and for researchers working in the HPC branch of the Jülich-Aachen Research Alliance (JARA).
The structure of the Blue Gene/Q is similar to that of the Blue Gene/P with increased performance metrics and on-board water cooling. The system will consist of eight racks and will have a peak performance of 1.6 petaflops. One rack contains 32 node boards with 32 compute nodes each. A node consists of a processor comprising 16 IBM PowerPC A2 cores (1.6 GHz, 64 bits) for the execution of user applications; one additional core is used for the operating system. Each core can execute four processes/threads and has a quad floating point unit. The maximal performance of the processor is 204.8 Gflop/s. The main memory per node is 16 GB and an integrated 5D torus provides 50 GB/s bandwidth and 2.5 µs latency (worst case). I/O nodes supply the connection to the JUST fileserver via 10 gigabit Ethernet technology.
JUQUEEN will be installed in two batches with four racks each: one in mid-April and the second one in June. Production will start mid-May. Further information can be found at http://www.fz-juelich.de/ias/jsc/juqueen.
Furthermore, Jülich intends to procure a second Blue Gene/Q system, funded by GCS, for national (GCS/NIC) and European (PRACE) users. It will succeed JUGENE and should be accessible in November 2012. To prepare for the replacement, the final shutdown of JUGENE has been scheduled for 31 July 2012, i.e. before the end of the allocation period expiring in autumn 2012. All JUGENE users with ongoing projects will receive compensation of their "dropped" JUGENE compute time. Emails to this effect have been sent to the users affected. All project data accessible on JUGENE will also be accessible on the Blue Gene/Q system.
To allow for maximum capability, JUQUEEN and the GCS-funded Blue Gene/Q system will be coupled in October 2012. No user access to these machines will be possible during this time. After the replacement has been completed in November 2012, we at JSC are looking forward to presenting an improved leadership-class supercomputer infrastructure to our users.
(Contact: Dr. Norbert Attig, n.attig@fz-juelich.de)
from JSC News No. 203, 14 April 2012