Official Inauguration of JUQUEEN

On 14 February 2013, the new supercomputer at JSC, JUQUEEN, was officially inaugurated in the presence of representatives from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the Ministry of Innovation, Science and Research of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia (MIWF). After the last four of the 28 compute racks had been installed in January, JSC was proud to present JUQUEEN in its final configuration to the public.

Prof. Achim Bachem, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Forschungszentrum Jülich, welcomed the guests and thanked the ministries for their financial support provided through the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS). Prof. Wolf-Dieter Lukas, head of Directorate 5 at BMBF, delivered the official greeting on behalf of the federal minister. He congratulated Forschungszentrum Jülich for being part of the European FET Flagship "Human Brain Project", which will definitely add its share to the scientific simulations running on JUQUEEN. Helmut Dockter, State Secretary at MIWF, addressed JSC in the name of the NRW minister. He expressed his expectation to obtain simulation results relevant to the needs of society in order to facilitate future financial support. Prof. Thomas Lippert, head of JSC, presented a short history of the rapid development in supercomputing, outlined the scientific problems of high complexity that can be tackled with JUQUEEN, and gave an outlook on special simulations suitable to be run on this supercomputer. Following the speeches, the guests were invited to visit JUQUEEN in the machine room, and to toast the computer at a subsequent reception.

In the afternoon, the event continued with a scientific colloquium "Supercomputing in North Rhine-Westphalia". Four renowned top scientists from the fields of brain research, materials science, fluid dynamics and civil security research presented their simulations and gave an outlook on how JUQUEEN will enable new scientific insight for their fields.
(Contact: Dr. Sabine Höfler-Thierfeldt, s.hoefler-thierfeldt@fz-juelich.de)