High-performance computing resources

Scientists and students at the German Research School for Simulation Sciences have privileged access to the high-performance computing facilities at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) and the Center 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 operates a compute cluster with more than 700 x86-processor based compute nodes containing some 6000 cores and more than 16 TB of main memory. 200 nodes interconnected with a fast QDR Infiniband network and equipped with the latest Intel processors ("Nehalem EP") and 24 GB of main memory have recently been installed as a first step towards the new HPC cluster, which is scheduled to be completed by end of 2010 after the completion of the extension building of the Center for Computing and Communication.
The file server infrastructure consists of a highly available NetApp file server and also a Lustre file server for fast parallel file access. By end of 2010 the total compute power will be increased to over 200 TeraFlop/s. The total main memory capacity will be about 61 TeraByte. The single compute nodes will contain up to 64 cores and up to 512 GigaByte. Currently 95% of compute nodes are operated with CentOS Linux and 5% with Windows 2008 Server. More information on the system roadmap is available here.
Source: Center for Computing and Communication of RWTH Aachen University
The utilization of those resources provides a cornerstone for the German Research School of Simulation Sciences. Only with the necessary resources at hand development, testing and production runs of highly scalable high-performance codes become possible.