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“This has created the best conditions for research in Germany. Access to powerful computers is a prerequisite for top-level research in many fields and for economic success in international competition,” said Thomas Rachel, Parliamentary State Secretary at the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). With more than 13 million euros, the Federal Research Ministry is financing the majority of the costs for JUGENE. With more than 65,000 processors and maximum computing performance of almost 170 teraflop/s (trillions of computing operations per second), JUGENE is four times faster than what had previously been Germany’s most powerful computer and almost three times as fast as the previously fastest European computer in Spain.
“With this computer, we have further strengthened our position in Europe,” said Rachel. At the initiative of the BMBF, Germany’s three high-performance computing centres in Jülich, Munich and Stuttgart agreed on close cooperation and founded the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing in April 2007. “The Gauss Centre is taking a leading role in establishing the European supercomputer centre.” The first step towards this is the European PRACE project (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe), which began on January 1, 2008, a consortium of national supercomputer centres from 14 European countries under the leadership of Germany’s Gauss Centre.
Thomas Rachel: “We will continue to create the conditions in Germany for playing the leading role in the European supercomputer ecosystem. The BMBF will continue to provide its share of the joint financing of supercomputers in future. This also applies to expanding the Gauss Centre into the German Gauss Alliance for Supercomputing. In future, alongside the three supercomputing centres, Germany’s high-performance computing centres are also to be integrated into it.
Alongside theory and experiment, the simulation of complex processes has become an indispensable method in research and development. Climate research, medical research, high-energy and plasma physics, and vehicle construction, for example, are now inconceivable without computer simulations. The following applies: the more powerful the supercomputer available for calculating and visualising such simulations, the better, i.e. more detailed, more error-free and faster, the simulation. In modern science, this results in the decisive knowledge advantage and, for innovative sectors of the economy, a decisive competitive advantage.
