JUROPA - Successor System

In summer 2009, the first general-purpose part of JSC's dual architecture strategy - the supercomputer JUROPA together with the HPC-FF partition for the European Fusion Community - went into operation. It quickly became obvious that this system co-designed by JSC was very useful for our users, and in a final step, over 220 projects and more than 1000 users benefited from more than 95 % operational availability of the system. The demand for computing time on JUROPA in the bi-yearly calls was up to seven times higher than the maximum time available on the system.

After a five-year period, the end of this workhorse's lifetime cycle is now rapidly approaching. For this reason, the Supervisory Board of Forschungszentrum Jülich approved JSC’s proposal to procure a successor system for JUROPA in its May meeting. This system will increase the total peak performance to about 2 petaflop/s without consuming more energy or requiring more cooling capacity. It is planned to have this system installed by the end of 2014. Until installation, the current system will still be available for user operation.

Currently, JSC is soliciting system proposals from different companies and hopes to finalize a contract as soon as possible. Additionally, we plan to make a small prototype system available in late summer with a similar architecture to the final system. Current users will be granted early access to ease the migration of their programs and to facilitate efficient use of a more modern system architecture.
(Contact: Klaus Wolkersdorfer, k.wolkersdorfer@fz-juelich.de)