Thomas Lippert, Director of the Institute for Advanced Simulation and Head of Jülich Supercomputing Center
The JURECA supercomputer in Germany just got a major upgrade with help from Dell EMC.
The second module of JURECA is as large as an entire supercomputer: the booster is accommodated across 33 cabinets in the computer hall of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC). The expansion, developed by Intel and the JSC in cooperation with Dell EMC and ParTec to massively increase the available computing power, is directly connected to the first module, the cluster, which was supplied by T-Platforms in 2015.
Thanks to the additional 5 petaflops, the Jülich supercomputer now appears as one of the fastest computers in Europe on the TOP500 list of the fastest computers in the world. This is the first time that a supercomputer with an innovative modular architecture has gone into productive operation worldwide.
The modular concept of JURECA -(JURECA stands for “Jülich Research on Exascale Architectures”) – originates from the EU-funded research projects DEEP and DEEP-ER. The aim of the projects, led by Dr. Estela Suarez, a scientist from Jülich, was to develop a modular supercomputer architecture that is specially tailored to the requirements of modern simulation codes. Various types of modules can be dynamically allocated to the programs by means of the “ParaStation” software system developed by the Munich-based company ParTec, so that their individual advantages can be exploited.
This works like a turbocharger: a booster module accelerates calculations on a cluster module, or in other words, complex parts of the code, which are difficult to calculate simultaneously on a large number of processors, are executed on the so-called cluster module “, explains Prof. Thomas Lippert, head of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre and originator of the concept. “Simpler parts of the program that can be processed in parallel with greater efficiency, i.e., they are scalable, are transferred to the booster module.
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