Farewell, JUROPA

On 24 June 2015, our JUROPA cluster computer was phased out of operation as it has reached the end of its very effective lifetime of almost six years. The acronym JUROPA refers to "Juelich Research on Petaflop Architectures". The JUROPA concept was developed as an early co-design project when nobody was talking about co-design. It followed a best-of-breed approach bringing together the most performant processors at this time from Intel, the Nehalem, the most efficient QDR Infiniband network by Mellanox, the most effective cabling and switch technology developed by SUN, the most evolved cluster computing software ParaStation by ParTec, and Europe's most experienced system integrator and vendor, Bull.

JUROPA had reached a total performance of nearly 300 teraflops already in 2009. It has been one of the most efficient cluster systems as far as the Linpack is concerned. With JUROPA, Jülich has made its most successful investment ever in terms of supercomputers. JUROPA has helped to deliver a host of extremely valuable scientific results ranging from astrophysics, via quantum physics, brain research, biophysics, social sciences to security research etc. Many SCIENCE and NATURE papers can confirm the success of the system.

JUROPA will soon be replaced by JURECA, the E stands for the direction towards Exa, of course there is still a very long way to go. Our hardware partner is T-Platforms from Moscow, we use Intel Haswell processors and Mellanox EDR-technology, again operated via ParTec's ParaStation. JURECA will exploit self-healing mechanisms developed on JUROPA.

When JUROPA was switched off it was in a state better than ever before. Co-development and continuous co-design do pay off.
(Contact: Prof. Thomas Lippert, th.lippert@fz-juelich.de)