JUWELS – Installation of JUQUEEN Successor Started

In spring 2018, an era will come to an end at JSC. After more than 14 successive years, in which all three generations of the Blue Gene architecture were operated by JSC, the last Blue Gene/Q system at JSC – JUQUEEN – will be shut down soon. The successor system called Jülich Wizard for European Leadership Science – or JUWELS for short – will be constructed as a modular supercomputer. This architectural paradigm has been developed at JSC over the past few years and was successfully demonstrated at scale in 2017, when the JURECA Cluster-Booster system was unveiled and ranked 29th on the November Top500 list.

The JUWELS system will consist of multiple, architecturally diverse but fully integrated, Tier-0 modules designed for specific simulations and data science tasks. The first module, which is set to replace the JUQUEEN system in 2018, will be a versatile cluster architecture based on commodity multi-core CPUs. A second booster module, optimized for massively parallel workloads, is currently scheduled for the beginning of 2020. In the meantime, JUQUEEN users can also answer the call for compute time on the highly scalable JURECA Booster module.

The JUWELS Cluster module is supplied by Atos based on its Sequana architecture. The Munich-based company ParTec will provide software and support for systems operation. The module will consist of about 2,550 compute nodes, each with two Intel Xeon 24-core Skylake CPUs and 96 GiB of main memory. About 9% of the compute nodes will be equipped with twice the main memory (192 GiB) capacity. In addition, about 2% of the compute nodes will feature four of the latest-generation NVIDIA Volta GPUs. The compute nodes are interconnected with a Mellanox EDR InfiniBand interconnect. The system will use ParTec’s ParaStation cluster middleware. The peak performance of the system will be 12 petaflops (10.4 petaflops without GPUs).
(Contact: Dr. Dorian Krause, d.krause@fz-juelich.de)

from JSC News No. 255, January 2018