VISUALIZATION

Today, IBM announced that the Research Centre Juelich in Germany becomes host to Europe’s most powerful supercomputer. The IBM computer, based on IBM's eServer p690 systems, will be used by leading scientists all over Germany to tackle some of the grand challenges of science. It will be capable of a peak performance of 8.9 teraflops – the equivalent of 8.9 trillion floating point operations per second. Juelich is one of the 3 national supercomputing centres in Germany along with the High Performance Computing Centre in Stuttgart (HLRS) and the Leibniz Computing Centre (LRZ) in Munich (also an IBM system). Another large IBM installation can be found at the High Performance Compute Centre Hanover and Berlin (HLRN). In fact, according to ARCADE, the independent European academic platform for the exchange of information on high end computing policies and infrastructures, Germany is currently the leading country in Europe in the field of supercomputing, with twice as many teraflops as the closest contenders - France and the United Kingdom (1). The implementation of an IBM system at the Research Centre Juelich means that IBM is now the supplier of the top three supercomputers in Germany and eight out of the ten most powerful machines in Europe (2). The Research Centre Juelich is one of Europe’s leading scientific institutes. Its research activities cover five key areas: matter, energy, information technology, life, and environment. The new supercomputer will give scientists from all over Germany access to huge amounts of computing power and allow researchers to work together on some of the most pressing and compute intensive problems: from the search for a long-term environmentally compatible energy supply to the tracking down of minute but possibly life-threatening defects in man and material. One of the first areas to benefit from the supercomputer is a project using complex mathematical models to predict the diffusion of harmful materials in soil. Using computer-simulated models scientists can calculate the flow of water underground and simulate how various harmful substances react with potentially damaging consequences. "Today, the natural sciences regard computational techniques as a third pillar alongside experiment and theory", said Dr. Thomas Lippert of Juelich. "Examples are large-scale data processing to screen for a new drug or the simulation of systems with infinite variables in the fields of theoretical chemistry, physics or computational biology. For many problems in solid state or high energy physics, only computer simulations can provide the missing link between empiricism and theory." "Supercomputing power removes many of the limits on research that scientists often encounter," said Dave Jursik, VP Deep Computing, IBM. “IBM is the leading supplier of supercomputers in Europe and is changing the face of the application of technology to solving complex scientific problems. Both the implementation of large general purpose super computers like the p690s at Juelich or IBM's industry leading Blue Gene supercomputing research project demonstrate our leadership. The selection of IBM to supply Juelich with Europe’s largest supercomputer is testimony to IBM’s experience in providing high performance computers to the scientific community. Scientists all over the world rely on IBM supercomputers to run models and simulations in order to solve some of the most complex but crucial scientific problems – from environmental protection and life sciences to climate analysis and weather forecasting..” The Juelich supercomputer has 1312 processors provided by 41 IBM p690 servers with 32 processors per unit, using the POWER4+ copper/SOI technology. The cluster is managed by IBM’s Cluster Systems Management (CSM) software based on AIX 5.2 ­ the company's flagship Unix operating system. Cluster nodes interconnect via the newly announced pSeries High Performance Switch providing a redundant low latency and high bandwidth communication network to all processors - with a bandwidth of more than 100 Gb/s per server. Each system has access to several parallel filesystems based on IBM’s General Parallel Filesystem (GPFS) software using latest Storage Area Network technology powered by the FAStT Storage Server product line. Users have access to 60 tera bytes of data capacity – the equivalent of 60 trillion bytes, or roughly 60 million 1000-page-books. The IBM supercomputer is accessible through UNICORE - a European grid computing initiative that allows for the sharing of high performance computing resources via national and European grid computing networks. Grid computing will allow for greater collaboration between scientists from different departments, institutions and organisations across Germany and world-wide. (1) see http://www.arcade-eu.info/academicsupercomputing/comparision.html, correct at date of publication. (2) In Germany IBM is the supplier of supercomputers for example at Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, the HLRN and Deutscher Wetterdienst, In Europe, IBM is the supplier of supercomputers for example at HPCx in the United Kingdom; 2 separate systems at ECMWF in the United Kingdom; the Max-Planck Institute in Germany; the Atomic Weapons Establishment in the United Kingdom; Deutscher Wetterdienst in Germany; SARA (Stichting Academisch Rekencentrum) in the Netherlands ; Compagnie Generale de Geophysique (CGG) in the United Kingdom. Information on Research Centre Jülich Research Centre Jülich is the largest interdisciplinary research centre in Europe with an annual budget of € 360 million (including special tasks) and a staff of 4200 (as of 2003). The company partners of "Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH" are the Federal Republic of Germany (90%) and the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia (10%).The Research Centre, founded in 1956, is one of the 15 members of the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres, the largest science organization in Germany.In Jülich, scientists from the disciplines of physics, chemistry, biology, medicine and the engineering sciences work together on an interdisciplinary basis in the fields of matter, energy, information, life and the environment.This work concerns both long-term contributions in basic research for science and technology as well as concrete technological applications for industry.