QPACE3 Completely Installed

The installation of both phases of the 3rd generation of QPACE systems has been completed at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC). The "QCD Parallel Computing Engine (QPACE)" project was started in 2007 by the universities of Regensburg and Wuppertal within the framework of the transregional Collaborative Research Centers SFB/TRR 55. The new system QPACE3 comprises 672 Fujitsu PRIMERGY CX1640 M1 servers with one Intel Xeon Phi 7210 processor each. All 43,008 cores could in theory deliver a performance of 1.79 Pflop/s. The nodes are interconnected using Intel's new Omnipath network technology, which also includes a few storage nodes. The storage can be accessed through a BeeGFS parallel file system.

The compute nodes are directly liquid cooled, which facilitates a very high packaging density. The whole system fits into nine racks that are not even fully populated. The efficiency of the liquid cooling system allows for high temperatures. With an outlet water temperature above 40 °C, most of the heat is removed using power-efficient dry free cooling. JSC is using the experience obtained with QPACE3 to plan for its next large-scale supercomputer, which is going to be installed next year.

QPACE3 is mainly dedicated to simulating the theory for strong interactions, namely quantum chromodynamics, in a version that is discretized on a lattice. The first phase of the system is listed at position 482 of the Top500 list and position 18 of the Green500 list. Further details about QPACE3 can be found at http://www.fz-juelich.de/ias/jsc/qpace3.
(Contact: Prof. Dirk Pleiter)

from JSC News No. 252, 10 October 2017