Farewell JUGENE

Installed in October 2007, JUGENE with its 16 racks became the most powerful supercomputer in Europe and was ranked second in the international Top500 list in November 2007. As the concept of this Blue Gene/P system proved very successful and the user demand was overwhelming, JUGENE was later expanded to 72 racks in the context of the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS). User operation of what was the first petaflop system in Europe started in June 2009.

On 31 July 2012, having been in use for nearly five years, what is still largest Blue Gene/P in the world will be shut down. JUGENE’s 72 water-cooled racks will then be removed to make room for the superseding Blue Gene/Q system.

Managing the huge number of components was a challenge when operation began, but JUGENE proved to be an extremely stable system after the start-up period. Many scientific user groups from GCS, PRACE, and Forschungszentrum Jülich ran production jobs, pushing the usage to an average of over 95% of the computing time, and quite a few successfully ran jobs in parallel on all 294,912 cores. The results of these scientific applications have been published in several articles in renowned magazines such as Nature and Science.

We bid this workhorse farewell, and welcome the new Blue Gene/Q (JUQUEEN), which will provide even more computing power to our users in the future.
(Contact: Jutta Docter)

from JSC News No. 206, 13 July 2012