Archive notice: This article was originally published on November 13, 2007. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Forschungszentrum Jülich has maintained its place among the world’s leaders in supercomputing. Tomorrow, Tuesday, the TOP-500 list of the world’s fastest computers will be officially presented at the SC07 supercomputing conference in Reno, USA. JUGENE, installed in Jülich, achieves 2nd place on it, and is thus the fastest supercomputer in Europe.
JUGENE, currently the largest computer of the Blue Gene/P type manufactured by IBM, is listed with a computing performance of 167 teraflops. The Jülich supercomputer is thus below the peak performance of 220 teraflops announced in June of this year. “This value should be no cause for surprise”, Klaus Wolkersdorfer, head of the High Performance Systems department in Jülich, explains to pressetext. “After all, the 220 teraflops are a theoretical peak value, while the 167 teraflops were determined with the Linpack benchmark test customary in the supercomputing field”.
But performance has long no longer been everything that counts in the field of supercomputing either. “The special thing about our JUGENE is its extremely low power consumption compared with other systems, with the very highest computing performance”, says Thomas Lippert, Director of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre, and points out that “energy efficiency will be the dominant topic in the construction of supercomputers in future”.
With JUGENE and its predecessors JUMP and JUBL, more than 65,000 processors are now available in Jülich, connected via an extremely powerful communication-network. Their computing performance is used by around 200 research groups from a broad spectrum of fields. At SC07, the Jülich Supercomputer Centre presents itself with a selection from the fields of environmental and materials research.
