The JARA-HPC partition consists of contingents of the high-performance computers and supercomputers installed at RWTH Aachen University (RWTH Compute Cluster) and Forschungszentrum Jülich (JUQUEEN). The partition will be successively established in the course of 2012; by the end of 2012 it will have reached its total computing power of about 600 TFlops.
RWTH Compute Cluster
The RWTH Compute Cluster currently comprises approximately 2,500 computers with different configurations; 1,500 of these belong to the new Bull Cluster. At present, all computing nodes are equipped with processors of the x86_64 architecture and run on the operating systems Linux and Windows. All in all, a third of the cluster with a computing power of 100 TFlops will be made available for users of the JARA-HPC partition.
Photo: RWTH Compute Cluster, D. Both, Bull GmbH
There are two different node types in the RWTH Compute Cluster:
(1) MPI-S/L (Linux): Each node has two Intel Westmere-EP processors (3 GHz, 6 cores) with 24 GB (S) resp. 96 GB (L) main memory.
(2) SMP-S/L (Linux): Each node has 16 Intel Nehalem-EX processors (2 GHz, 8 cores) with 256 GB (S) resp. 1024 GB (L) main memory.
The smallest unit that can be requested for a computing job is one node. Which type of node is requested depends on the options to use parallelism resp. the required main memory. Nodes of the type MPI-S/L are best suited for scalable MPI applications, whereas nodes of the type SMP-S/L serve best in cases of shared memory parallelism or in cases of many less parallel computing jobs with the need for large memory capacities.
The utilization of the data storage is free of charge as long as a certain basic value is not exceeded. Users have to pay for the license costs of ISV packets themselves unless these are covered by existing license agreements.
You find more information about how to use the RWTH Computer Cluster here.
You can download the detailed manual here.
For further information please contact the ServiceDesk of the Center of Computing and Communication of RWTH Aachen University.
JUQUEEN - (Blue Gene/Q)
The new FZJ's supercomputer JUQUEEN is an IBM Blue Gene/Q system. In January 2013, the installation of 28 racks with an overall peak performance of about 6 Petaflops was finished. 500 Teraflops of JUQUEEN's total computing power are now available for the JARA-HPC partition.
Photo: JUQUEEN, FZ Jülich
Each of JUQUEEN's racks contains 32 node boards with 32 nodes each. A node consists of a processor with 16 IBM PowerPC A2 processor cores (1.6 GHz, 64 bits) and has 16 GB of memory. An additional core is used for the operating system.
Each processor core can execute four processes/threads simultaneously (fourfold simultaneous multithreading, SMT) and has a quad floating point unit (FPU), thus enabling the simultaneous execution of four fused multiply-add (FMA) operations with real numbers resp. two FMA operations with complex numbers in double precision. The maximum processor performance is 204.8 GFlops/s.
In order to use this architecture efficiently, a hybrid parallelization strategy is usually needed (e.g. MPI/OpenMP or MPI/Pthreads), especially under consideration of the available memory of 16 GB RAM per node, i.e. 256 MB per process/thread with four processes/threads per processor core.
You find more information about JUQUEEN here.
