Production Start on JURECA-DC
On 30 November, we bid farewell to the JURECA Cluster after five years of operation. As announced in July, the successor system, the JURECA-DC (“data centric”) module, will take its place and complete the revised JURECA supercomputer, consisting of the new JURECA-DC module and the Intel Xeon Phi-based Booster module, for the coming years.
The deployment of the JURECA-DC module started in July following the decommissioning of the first half of the JURECA Cluster. From the beginning of December, the first phase of the JURECA-DC module will be available to users with only a short service interruption.
This first phase of JURECA-DC consists of 384 CPU nodes, each with 128 AMD Rome EPYC cores per node, and 48 nodes additionally equipped with four NVIDIA A100 GPUs. The system thus contains about two thirds of the final system’s CPU nodes and 25 % of the GPU nodes. The staggered deployment, which is required due to facility limitations prohibiting a parallel installation of the JURECA-DC module during operation of the Cluster module, also implies that some features – e.g. the system-integrated non-volatile memory partition – will only be available with the full installation, which is scheduled to be fully deployed in the first quarter of 2021. For detailed information on JURECA, please visit https://fz-juelich.de/ias/jsc/jureca.
Since summer, the reduction in size of the JURECA Cluster has led to a noticeable increase in wait times for users. While this shortage of compute resources could be seen to underline the continuing appeal of the JURECA Cluster, JSC saw the need to provide users with additional access to the JUSUF system in order to alleviate the impact of the transition phase. It is expected that the availability of the first phase of JURECA-DC, which – with approx. 49,000 cores and 192 A100 GPUs – already significantly exceeds the capabilities of the old JURECA Cluster, will restore the job wait times and system backlog to the expected level.
Contact: Philipp Thörnig, p.thoernig@fz-juelich.de
from JSC News No. 277, 9 December 2020
