GOVERNMENT

New Blue Gene Water Cooling Technology Reduces Need for Air Conditioning by 91 percent: The German research center Forschungszentrum Juelich has selected IBM to develop the first  supercomputer in Europe capable of one Petaflop, or one thousand trillion operations per second. IBM will partner with German Gauss Centre for Supercomputing to install the new IBM Blue Gene/P System in the first half of this year.
 
This new system will help assure Forschungszentrum Juelich remains one of Europe’s most renowned research  centers and continues to play an important role in the global high  performance computing research community. The German Ministry of Research (BMBF) and Ministry of Research of Northrhine-Westfalia (MIWFT) will finance the project within the context of their support for the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing. The new supercomputer will be the first system that has been selected and purchased in the context of the German Gauss Center for Supercomputing (GCS).
 
This new Blue Gene System is the first to include new water cooling  technology that uses room temperature water to cool the servers.  As air moves through the server racks heat is removed as it passes through the  water-based cooling system before it enters the next rack of servers. This result is a 91 percent reduction in air conditioning that would have been required to cool Forschungszentrum Juelich’s data center with servers lacking this new water cooling technology.

"Supercomputers of this performance level are universal key technology  instruments to solve most complex and urgent scientific problems in many  areas," comments Professor Achim Bachem, Chairman of the Board of  Forschungszentrum Juelich. "Scientists of all disciplines use  supercomputers to identify climate changes, conduct research about  protein folding in cells, how semiconductors work or how fuel cells can  be improved."
 
"With speeds over a Petaflop, this new Juelich-based supercomputer  offers the processing ability of more than 50,000 laptop computers,”  explains Professor Thomas Lippert, lead scientist of the Juelich supercomputing center. "In addition to raw power, this new system will  be among the most energy efficient in the world."
 
"Forschungszentrum Juelich and IBM complement each other ideally with a  focus in developing compact systems with industry leading performance  and energy efficiency", said Martin Jetter, general manager, IBM  Germany. "This new petaflop Blue Gene system will ensure that Germany  remains relevant for leading research and engineering."
 
The new Blue Gene/P System will include nearly 295,000 POWER processors in 72 racks and also include over 144 terabytes of memory.  It will  significantly add to Forschungszentrum Juelich’s  existing  supercomputing capability at the Center, which includes an additional 6 petabytes of hard disk drive space, the amount equivalent of more than one million DVDs.

Inauguration and naming of the new systems will take place at an opening ceremony in mid 2009.
 
The new supercomputer will be the first system that has been selected and purchased in the context of the German Gauss Center for  Supercomputing (GCS).

The new Juelich Blue Gene System in Brief:

Type: IBM Blue Gene / P
Peak Performance: 1 Petaflop
Processors: 294 912
Processor Type: 32-bit PowerPC 450 core 850 MHz
Compute node: 4-way SMP processor
Memory: 144 Terabytes
Racks: 72
Network Latency: 160 Nanoseconds
Network Bandwidth: 5.1 Gigabyte/s
Energy consumption: 2200 Kilowatts