High-performance computing and visualization resources

Scientists and students at the German Research School for Simulation Sciences have privileged access to the high-performance computing facilities at Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) and to the extraordinary visualization resources at the Centre for Computing and Communication of RWTH Aachen University.

No less than three supercomputers for European research are available in Jülich: JUGENE, JUROPA and HPC-FF. 

JUGENE is currently the fastest computer in Europe with a computing power of one petaflop/s. This is equal to the computing power of more than 50,000 PCs. The new supercomputer’s some 295,000 processors are housed in 72 cabinets, each around the size of a phone booth, in the computer room in JSC. Its storage capacity is around 144 terabytes. Together with the other Jülich supercomputers, JUGENE will have access to around 6 petabytes of hard-drive storage. This corresponds to the storage capacity of more than a million DVDs.
		The second supercomputer JUROPA is based on a cluster configuration of NovaScale servers from the French computer specialist Bull, and on blade servers from the American company Sun with Intel Nehalem processors. It consists of 2208 computing nodes with a total computing capacity of 207 teraflop/s.
The third member of the group is the first computer dedicated to European fusion research. Fusion researchers intend to use the HPC-FF supercomputer to better understand the complex mechanisms in the hot fusion matter, the plasma, that reaches a temperature of 100 million degrees Celsius inside the ITER fusion reactor. It consists of 1080 computing nodes each equipped with two Nehalem EP Quad Core processors from Intel. The total of 8640 water-cooled processors have a clock rate of 2.93 GHz each and they will be able to access approximately 24 terabytes of total main memory.
Source: Forschungszentrum Jülich
The Center for Computing and Communication of RWTH Aachen University hosts own clusters which can be used with Linux as well as Windows. More information on the HPC clusters can be found here. Another focus is virtual reality. A detailed list on available hardware and software as well as other information is given here.