JURECA - First Experiences

At 10:00 on Monday, 13 July 2015, the first phase of the JURECA system, consisting of 260 compute nodes with dual socket Haswell CPUs and 128 GiB main memory, went into production. The system was well received by users who had waited eagerly for the launch of the new system after the shutdown of JUROPA. Within a few hours the system utilization skyrocketed and has stayed at a constantly high level since then. The launch happened just in time for the International Supercomputing Conference ISC15 in Frankfurt, Germany, where JURECA was proudly presented at the JSC and T-Platforms booths and received much attention from exhibition visitors.

Users were able to prepare their jobs for the new architecture using the test system JUROPATEST, thus reducing the time required to start simulations on JURECA. Nevertheless, while the first phase of JURECA is close to its predecessor in terms of peak performance, the increased core count per node and architectural changes require the adaptation of workflows and optimization of applications. JSC is actively working with users to better adapt their jobs to JURECA. The JUROPATEST test system has been decommissioned and refurbished for a new purpose and is no longer available for JURECA users.

Over the last few weeks, JURECA has shown very satisfactory reliability despite its cutting-edge technology, such as the brand new Mellanox EDR InfiniBand. The tuning and optimization of the system software and hardware is continuing after the start of production, and maintenance sessions are scheduled as needed to further improve the system. In parallel, work on the second JURECA phase, which could only be started after JUROPA had been decommissioned, is progressing. It is planned to make the full JURECA system with its 1,884 compute nodes in various configurations available to users in September.
(Contact: Dr. Dorian Krause)

JSC News, 11 August 2015