HPCwire: Julich Supercomputing Center Keeps Germany on the Cutting Edge of HPC

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June 22, 2009

Julich Supercomputing Center Keeps Germany on the Cutting Edge of HPC

by John West, for HPCwire

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Thomas Lippert, director of the Jülich Supercomputing Center in Germany, is speaking at this year's International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg about his experiences with the exotic systems that lead the TOP500 list of the HPC community's preeminent supercomputers, and the scientific breakthroughs that they enable. He is in a position to speak with some authority on the subject: JUGENE, Jülich's 223 teraflops Blue Gene/P debuted at number two on the November 2007 TOP500 list, and a year later was still at number 11. With JUGENE's recent upgrade to a peak petaflop, the center will claim a top 5 spot on the list. And Jülich has also been hard at work on a new 300 teraflops system that they expect to debut in the top 10.

We caught up with Dr. Lippert by email before the conference to get a sneak peak at his thoughts on working at the extremes of computation.

HPCwire: You are speaking during a panel session called "Hype & Reality: Experiences with the Leading Systems from the TOP500 List." This is a provocative name for a session! Can you tell us what the reality has been for you with JUGENE as a center operator?

Thomas Lippert: When the Jülich Supercomputing Center started offering a 6 teraflops Blue Gene/L in 2005, there was no "hype" at all. The simple "reality" was that no available supercomputer technology could scale far beyond 1,000 processors for most of the challenging application codes. Before, we had organized a workshop inviting Blue Gene friends as well as antagonists from several scientific disciplines with the need for large-scale simulations. Many of the antagonists turned from Saul to Paul and became convinced that it might be very worthwhile to complement our IBM p690 systems by this type of highly-scalable machine.

Since then we have continuously stepped the performance up, going to a 46 teraflops Blue Gene/L at the beginning of 2006, a 223 teraflops Blue Gene/P at the end of 2007, and now our petaflops system, JUGENE. In this process, it was most important that we could keep our users with us. Together, we certainly have contributed to shape reality and to create hype for petaflops.

Of course, we had to learn together with our friends from IBM how to install and operate the Blue Gene systems, as is always the case with novel innovative technology. The installations for the upgrades went smooth and fast, and the Blue Gene systems have always been extremely reliable. During the installation of the first 16-rack Blue Gene/P worldwide some buggy processors kept us busy for about two months, but the current petaflops system was installed and benchmarked within only one month and it has been running stable since then. After the tuning of our 6-petabyte GPFS, we expect production will start at the beginning of July. However, JUGENE required a considerable time for preparation as we changed our infrastructure from air to water cooling. With water cooling we can benefit fully from the exceptional energy efficiency of JUGENE.

Actually Jülich is following a dual strategy: at the time we installed the petaflops system, we also built a 300 teraflops cluster system, consisting of JuRoPA and HPC-FF -- the latter for the fusion community -- with 24,000 cores altogether. These systems are based on Intel quad-core Nehalems and Mellanox/Sun Microsystems interconnect technology. Together with our partners Bull and Sun, we managed to bring the system into operation within one month and to achieve a rank in the top 10 of the TOP500. This is, to a large extent, the success of the cluster management software ParaStation, which is produced by ParTec in Munich.
JUGENE Blue Gene/P Supercomputer

HPCwire: And from a user perspective? What challenges have you faced bringing your user community along on some of the largest machines in the world?

Lippert: As I said, I think we managed to take the users with us. Despite a very strict peer review of the projects, which is carried out by our independent, science-governed John von Neumann Institute for Computing, the available time on the highly-scalable Blue Gene systems was always substantially overbooked by a factor of 5 to 10. This shows that the Blue Gene proved to be an extremely attractive supercomputer for many scientific fields, ranging from materials sciences, theoretical chemistry, computational biology, and elementary particle physics to engineering.

Initially, it took us half a year to get about 20 different application codes running on the system, while only those codes that could use more than 64 processors on a p690 qualified as eligible for the Blue Gene/L. Since then, the base of codes has been broadened considerably and the codes are optimized continuously. In order to achieve high performance, most kernel routines were improved by hand-coded assembler portions, or rely on highly-optimized libraries provided by IBM's software magicians. In fact, achieving high performance on our Intel clusters means modifying the codes using SSE and sophisticated libraries as well.

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