Haswell Test System Available in November

In December 2013, JSC, T-Platforms, and ParTec started a cooperation to develop and assess technologies for the next generation of JSC's general-purpose supercomputer. In the final stage of this JuRoPA (Jülich Research On Petaflops Architectures) cooperation, a test system named JUROPATEST was installed in September 2014. It is composed of 70 compute nodes, each powered by two Haswell CPUs, the latest generation of Intel Xeon processors. With its 1,960 cores, a total main memory of 9 TB, and a Mellanox InfiniBand interconnect, the system offers a peak performance of 72 Tflop/s and is the first of its kind in Europe. The system was successfully installed within only a few weeks and is currently being used to port and assess the developments of the JuRoPA collaboration on the new Intel processor platform.

By the beginning of November, JUROPATEST will be stable enough to open it up to users of JSC's current general-purpose supercomputer JUROPA to port and optimize their applications for the Haswell CPU. This is particularly important since the system that will succeed JUROPA will also be Haswell-based, and in many cases, substantial effort will be needed to leverage the new architectural features of this CPU. Details on the configuration and access to JUROPATEST can be found at http://www.fz-juelich.de/ias/jsc/juropatest.

The procurement of the JUROPA successor is ongoing, and details on the new system will be provided in one of the next issues of JSC news.
(Contact: Dr. Thomas Eickermann, th.eickermann@fz-juelich.de)

from JSC News, October 2014