Please activate JavaScript!
Please install Adobe Flash Player, click here for download

Foeschungszentrum Jülich - Research in Jülich 1_2013

1|2013 Research in Jülich 9 COVER STORY | Supercomputing cist was able to make effective use of a large number of compute nodes for his calculations soon after JUQUEEN had been put into operation. “We are thus able to include more atoms, simulate longer periods of time and also investi- gate several material systems simulta- neously,” Jones is happy to report. This means the results are more precise, in- formative and can be verified experi- mentally. Jones is convinced that increasing knowledge about the processes at play in phase-change materials will help to improve data storage. The Australian- born researcher adds: “In the past 35 years I never had the feeling that com- peting scientists anywhere in the world have had an advantage over me and my colleagues. Here at Jülich we have al- ways had access to the latest generation of the best computers.” JUQUEEN TOP OF THE CLASS In November 2012 it became clear that JUQUEEN was at the top of its class when another 16 JUQUEEN racks went into operation, connected to the 8 origi- nal racks. In this second configuration stage JUQUEEN took place 5 in the TOP500 list of the fastest supercomput- ers in the world. This place on the list also confirmed that JUQUEEN was the first supercomputer in Europe able to perform more than five quadrillion arith- metic operations per second. The di- mension of this performance almost de- fies the human imagination. If JUQUEEN were to move one millimetre for each arithmetic operation then in one second it would traverse the solar system – passing from the Sun to the dwarf planet Pluto. At the beginning of this year, four fur- ther racks were added so that the JUQUEEN supercomputer reached its fi- nal maximum performance of 5.9 peta- flop/s (1015 ). For simulations to make good use of this facility they must be highly scalable, as the experts put it. The speed of the calculations should in- crease approximately in proportion to the number of computer cores employed without the necessary additional data traffic and the waiting for the required Brain researcher Prof. Markus Diesmann (left) and materials scientist Dr. Robert Jones profit from JUQUEEN’s comput- ing capacity. He didn’t just keep a firm grip on the cables but also on the tight instal- lation schedule for JUQUEEN: Dr. Thomas Fieseler from JSC. Video

Pages