Supercomputers

Supercomputers of the highest performance leve

The Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) at Forschungszentrum Jülich operates and develops supercomputers of the highest performance level. The JSC goes back to the first national centre for supercomputing in Germany, which was founded in 1987, and with the Jülich Institute for Advanced Simulation (IAS) it is continuing the long tradition of scientific computing at Jülich.

The supercomputers JUWELS and JURECA currently rank among the most powerful in the world. They are based on a highly flexible modular architecture that Jülich experts developed together with European and international partners. The innovative concept aims to combine different types of modules that are designed for specific tasks such as massively parallel computing or big data analytics.

At Forschungszentrum Jülich, various supercomputers are available to science and industry for different purposes. The computers are used by numerous scientists at Forschungszentrum Jülich and several hundred research groups throughout Germany and Europe.

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Supercomputer for intensive calculations and AI

JUWELS

JUWELS is a multi-petaflop modular supercomputer representing a European and national supercomputing resource for the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing. In addition, JUWELS serves the Earth system modeling community and the AI community within the Helmholtz Association as well. The modular supercomputer was the fastest computer in Europe and the most-energy efficient of the 100 fastest computers in the world when it was launched. >> Press release

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Supercomputer for large data volumes

JURECA DC

With its novel architecture, the supercomputer JURECA supports a wide variety of high-performance computing and data analytics workloads. One particular focus is on processing gigantic volumes of data. This is possible using the JURECA-DC module (“DC” stands for data-centric). The system was supplied by the French company Atos and is operated using the Cluster software of the German company ParTec. >> Press release

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Interactive computing platform for the cloud

JUSUF

JUSUF is designed as a multi-purpose computing platform for cloud applications and traditional tasks in high-performance computing. European neuroscientists can access JUSUF via the European research infrastructure Fenix, especially for applications in the European Human Brain Project. Scientists from other disciplines can apply for computing time via the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE). >> JSC News

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And the development continues: JUPITER, the first European exascale computer, is currently being built at the Jülich Research Centre. The supercomputer is set to be the first in Europe to surpass the threshold of one quintillion calculations per second

More about JUPITER

Supercomputing resources in Europe and Germany

JSC joined forces with the High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS) and the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) in Garching near Munich to form the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS) – by far the most powerful supercomputing infrastructure for science and industry in Europe. Furthermore, JSC coordinates the European supercomputer network PRACE, which provides researchers throughout Europe with access to supercomputers of the highest performance level.

Supercomputers
Resources for high-performance computing (HPC) are provided at different levels, referred to as “tiers”. The various levels reflect the increasing computational effort and computing capacities. On both the European and national level, the most powerful supercomputers (also referred to as “high-performance computers”) are used in “Tier 0” and “Tier 1”. These are followed by “Tier 2”, which includes high-performance computers that are used on a regional or national level and have an average computing power. The basic level – “Tier 3” – comprises a broad range of systems with weaker computing power (e.g. at universities), which increasingly target early-career scientists in addition to researchers.

Last Modified: 15.01.2025