The first European PetaFLOPS machine to Germany

The German research center, Forschungszentrum Juelich has selected IBM Blue Gene/P to develop the first supercomputer in Europe capable of one PetaFLOPS. IBM will partner with Juelich-based Gauss Centre for Supercomputing to install the new IBM Blue Gene/P System in the first half of this year.

This new Blue Gene System is the first to include new water cooling technology, created by IBM Research that uses room temperature water to cool the servers. This result is a 91 percent reduction in air conditioning units that would have been required to cool Forschungszentrum Juelich's data center with an air-cooled Blue Gene.
Inauguration and naming of the new systems will take place at an opening ceremony in mid 2009. Forschungszentrum Juelich has JUBL (Juelich Blue Gene/L) and then JUGEN (Juelich Blue Gene/P)、and now JU???? (Juelich Blue Gene/P Full System).

Key specifications of 1PetaFLOPS Blue Gene/P
Processors: 294,912 Processors
Type: PowerPC 450 core 850 MHz
Compute node: 4-way SMP processor
Memory: 144 Terabytes
Racks: 72
Network Latency: 160 Nanoseconds
Network Bandwidth: 5.1 Gigabytes
Energy consumption: 2200 Kilowatts

In addition, Forschungszentrum Juelich will install 100TFLOPS HPC-FF (for Fusion) cluster system for the fusion scientists´ simulation programs of ITER experimental fusion reactor. It will consist of 1,080 computing nodes each equipped with two Nehalem EP Quad Core processors from Intel. The grand total of 8,640 processors will have a clock rate of 2.93 GHz each, they will be able to access about 24 terabytes of total main memory and will be water-cooled. French supercomputer manufacturer Bull will integrate the system and InfiniBand ConnectX QDR from the Israeli company Mellanox will be used as the network.
ITER will go into operation in 2018 and will be the first fusion reactor to generate at least 500 megawatts of excess power. ITER will be constructed in Cadarache, in the south of France, by a consortium consisting of the European Union, Japan, the USA, China, Russia, India and South Korea.


Germany (or EU) looks running one or two year behind US but steadily in supercomputer performance. Their government is much more positive in HPC investment than several years ago. In Japan, the fastest system is a T2K in University of Tokyo (140TFLOPS) and I can not see any delivery plan for more than 200TFLOPS system this year. Hence we may have to look at back of German supercomputers for a while (probably until end of FY 2011, delivery of 10PetaFLOPS Japanese Next Generation Supercomputer.)