HPCwire: Juelich IBM Supercomputer to be Europe's Most Powerful

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February 10, 2009

Juelich IBM Supercomputer to be Europe's Most Powerful

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New Blue Gene water cooling technology reduces need for air conditioning by 91 percent

JUELICH/STUTTGART, Germany, Feb. 10 -- 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, invented by IBM Research, 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 datacenter 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:

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