AUTOMOTIVE

The Structure of ZAM and NIC Professor Dietrich Wolf, Head of the Scientific Council, shortly discussed the development from HLRZ (Supercomputer Centre, Deutsches Höchstleistungsrechenzentrum). In 1986 theoretical physics all over Germany requested access to a German Supercomputer Center. In 1987 RCJ, GMD and DESY (Deutsches Elektronensynchroton), Hamburg started a joint initiative for this German Supercomputer Centre. It was the first time that reseqrchers all over Germany could access a supercomputer centre. In 1998 GMD left the cooperation and DESY and RCJ founded NIC (John von Neumann Institute for Computing). About 50% of the capacity is dedicated for researchers all over German, the other half is for FZJ itself and industrial projects. The academic and research users could access the machine for free, if the had a successful project review. NIC has specific competence groups to support the users and to do research and development in mathematics and informatics - high-performance computing, computer simulation for applications in natural science and techniques, numerical and stochastic methods, cluster and grid computing. The New Supercomputer On December 29, 2003 IBM delivered the new machine. A full reboot was done on February 5, on February 6, they transferred the user data to the new machine, about 10 TeraByte/s. The 30 nodes of the IBM cluster - following the contractual schedule, will be extended to 41 processors in March. IBM had to wait for the newly built computer room in the new ZAM technical building. A p690+ (Regatta) node consists of 32 POWER4+ processors, clocked 1,7 GHz. The shared memory sums up to 128 GByte. All the nodes are connected via the "High Performance Switch". FZJ is the very first site world-wide that uses this technology in a huge installation. The 41 nodes with 1312 POWER4+ processors will have an aggregated peak performance of about 8.9 TeraFlop/s, a main, distributed memory of 5.2 TeraBytes and a global disk space of 56 TeraBytes. The STK Tape Robot has a total capacity of 500 TeraBytes. It can be expected that the computer will have a Linpack performance of 4.5 TeraFlop/s. This will be a rank within the first 20 Top500 computers. The system, named Jump (JUelich MultiProcessor), costs about 42 Million Euro over a time frame of 5 years, the building about 5 Million Euros. The interest in high-performance computing is extremely high. The proposals of projects is a factor of 6 higher than the installed capacity. The new ZAM Director On July 11, 2002 Professor Friedel Hoßfeld, Director of ZAM for about 30 years, retired. He initiated and ran the project of the new supercomputer. On January 1st. Dr. Thomas Lippert, University of Wuppertal, became the new Director of ZAM. He is well known in the German HPC scene. In November 1999 he started the ALiCE cluster based on 128 Alpha CPUs. Beside the IBM p690+ system he additionally will further develop this technology in close cooperation with DESY, and Grid computing. He will extend UNICORE, an integrated environment. There will be a resource broker, accounting and Interfaces for specific applications. "In the past scientists used the experiment and the theory to gain results, but now scientific computing has changed their work", explained Dr. Thomas Lippert. He listed some of the applications areas like environmental research, material sciences, elementary particle physics, theoretical chemistry and physics. Some description of the applications can be found on the ZAM or NIC website. In the Press Meeting the officials underpinned the importance of this high-end supercomputer for the Germany and Research Centres' scientific community. About 100 research groups can use the faster supercomputer with a peak performance of nearly 9 TeraFlop/s. "Scientific Computing has a long tradition in Jülich, since 1983 with the first Cray. The new supercomputer tops Jülich to the fastest scientific computer centre in Europe and number 6 of the civil centers", explained Professor Joachim Treusch, Chairman of the Board of FZJ. Together with the head of the Supervisory Board of FZJ, Dr. Hermann Schunk, German Ministry of Research, he started a supercomputer application race between 32 processors of the old Cray T3E-1200 and one node of the p690+, 32 processors. It was environmental research, the simulation of the spread of pollutant in the ground water. The performance improvement was a factor of nearly 15 compared to the Cray T3E. http://jumpdoc.fz-juelich.de http://www.fz-juelich.de/nic http://www.fz-juelich.de/zam