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ePaper created 2013-04-09, 17:43:56 | version 1.25.6
Research in Jülich 1|201366 J UQUEEN can outperform more than 90,000 PCs and is faster than its predecessor, the supercomputer JUGENE. But Forschungszentrum Jülich did not need to make any adjustments to the electricity supply or the contract with its energy provider when changing from the supercomputer JUGENE to JUQUEEN. The new computer with a Blue Gene/Q system from IBM actually con- sumes on average less power than its predecessor – even though its comput- ing power is about six times as great. One reason for this efficiency is JUQUEEN’s 458,752 processor cores. Each of them is slower than the cores found in modern PCs. JUQUEEN’s devel- opers opted for these cores because with decreasing clock speed, the power consumption of each core decreases much more than the computing power. The large number of cores means that the overall JUQUEEN system is still ex- tremely fast. The important point is that the computer cores linking network and main memory all work in perfect har- mony. “Another secret of JUQUEEN’s energy efficiency is the direct water cooling whereby, in contrast to its predecessor JUGENE, the cooling water removes the heat directly from the computer cores,” explains Dr. Thomas Fieseler from the A Queen to be Reckoned With! JUQUEEN has taken up residence at Jülich. This is where Europe’s queen of computers meets with outstanding scientists who make good use of her talents in their research. She joins an organization that provides support with computer simulations for scien- tists from all over Europe and also experts already working on the energy-efficient high-performance computers of the future.