Europe’s Fastest Supercomputer Goes Online at JSC
After more than two years of extensive preparation, co-design, and deployment work, JSC – along with its project partners Atos, ParTec, and NVIDIA (including Mellanox Technologies, formerly Mellanox) – proudly unveiled the JUWELS Booster module at the 2020 Supercomputing conference. The new supercomputer module, which is tightly coupled with the Cluster system installed in 2018 that follows JSC’s modular supercomputing paradigm, fully lives up to its name and has boosted JUWELS to new heights.
The JUWELS Booster, which provides a peak performance of 73 PF/s in double precision, is now the fastest European supercomputer and the 7th fastest supercomputer worldwide, according to the Top500 ranking. Ranking 5th on the HPCG list and with a performance of 110 multi-precision PF/s on the new HPL-AI benchmark, the system is ideally suited for a broad range of scientific applications, including artificial intelligence and deep learning workloads. With a Gigaflop-per-Watt ratio of more than 25, the JUWELS Booster ranks 3rd on the Green500 list and is the most energy-efficient supercomputer among the top 100 supercomputers worldwide. The success of the co-design efforts, which have enabled JSC and its partners to couple the most energy-efficient processor technologies with highly effective system packaging and a direct liquid cooling design in a balanced system, also underlines JUWELS’ position as an architectural prototype for an upcoming European exascale system in the coming years.
During the installation phase, JSC worked with a number of early access users, who were able to port codes to the new architecture at an early stage and provide valuable feedback about the capabilities of the system. They also supported optimization and problem resolution efforts. Since 23 November, the JUWELS Booster has been officially in operation and JSC continues to optimize the system together with its users.
The modular supercomputer JUWELS is operated by JSC as a member of the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing and is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the Ministry of Culture and Science of the state of North-Rhine Westphalia. Information on the technical specification can be found at https://fz-juelich.de/ias/jsc/juwels.
Contact: Damian Alvarez, d.alvarez@fz-juelich.de,
Benedikt von St. Vieth, b.von.st.vieth@fz-juelich.de
from JSC News No. 277, 9 December 2020
