Farewell, JUROPA

On 24 June 2015, our JUROPA cluster computer was phased out of operation, having reached the end of its – very effective – lifetime of almost six years. The acronym JUROPA refers to "Juelich Research on Petaflop Architectures". The JUROPA concept was developed as an early co-design project at a time when nobody was talking about co-design. It followed a best-of-breed approach bringing together the most performant processors at this time from Intel, the Nehalem processors, the most efficient QDR Infiniband network by
Mellanox, the most effective cabling and switch technology developed by SUN, the most evolved cluster computing software ParaStation by ParTec and the expertise of Europe’s most experienced system integrator and vendor, Bull.

Already in 2009, JUROPA achieved a total performance of nearly 300 teraflops. According to Linpack, it was also one of the most efficient cluster systems. With JUROPA, Jülich made its most successful investment ever in terms of supercomputers. JUROPA helped deliver a host of extremely valuable scientific results, ranging from astrophysics to security research, via quantum physics, brain research, biophysics and social sciences, etc. Many Science and Nature papers attest to the system’s success.

JUROPA will soon be replaced by JURECA, the E in which stands for the direction towards exascale computing, although of course there is still a long way to go. Our hardware partner is T-Platforms from Moscow and we will be using Intel Haswell processors and Mellanox EDR-technology, once again operated via ParTec’s ParaStation. JURECA will exploit self-healing mechanisms developed on JUROPA.

When JUROPA was switched off, it was in a better state than ever had been till then. Co-development and continuous co-design do pay off.
(Contact: Prof. Thomas Lippert, th.lippert@fz-juelich.de)

JSC News No. 232, July 2015