JUMP Succession two more years. This should provide users No. 166 • July 2008 with sufficient available computing power On 1 July 2008, the new IBM Power6 ma- on the general purpose part and time to mi- chine p6 575 – known as JUMP, just like grate their applications to the new cluster. its predecessor – took over the production (Contact: Klaus Wolkersdorfer, ext. 6579) workload from the previous Power4 clus- ter as scheduled. First benchmark tests show that users can expect their applica- Gauss Alliance Founded tions to run about three times faster on the During the ISC 2008, an agreement was new machine. This factor could even be im- signed to found the Gauss Alliance, which proved by making the most out of the follow- will unite supercomputer forces in Ger- ing Power6 features: many. The Gauss Centre for Supercom- • Simultaneous multi-threading (SMT puting (GCS) and eleven regional and topi- mode): 64 threads (instead of 32) can cal high-performance computer centres are be used on one node, where 2 threads participating in the alliance, thus creating a now share one physical processor with computer association that is unique world- its dedicated memory caches and float- wide. The signatories are: Gauss Cen- ing point units. tre for Supercomputing (GCS), Center for • Medium size virtual memory pages Computing and Communication of RWTH (64K): applications can set 64K pages Aachen University, Norddeutscher Ver- as a default during link time and thus bund für Hoch- und Höchstleistungsrech- can benefit from improved hardware ef- nen (HLRN) consisting of Zuse Institute ficiencies by accessing these pages. Berlin (ZIB) and Regionales Rechenzen- For more information, visit our new website: trum für Niedersachsen (RRZN), Cen- http://www.fz-juelich.de/jsc/jump ter for Information Services and High The new machine has about the same peak Performance Computing (ZIH) in Dres- performance as the Power4 cluster. This den, Regionales Rechenzentrum Erlangen machine is an interim solution until the (RRZE), Center for Scientific Computing general purpose part of our dual super- of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University computer complex will be significantly up- Frankfurt (G-CSC), Rechenzentrum Gar- graded, as detailed below. ching (RZG) of the Max Planck Society and the IPP, Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum On 30 June, a contract was signed to install (DKRZ), Steinbuch Centre for Computing an Intel-based Linux cluster (codename: (SCC), Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD) and JUROPA) in 2009. This system will have Paderborn Center for Parallel Computing a peak performance of nearly 200 TFlop/s (PC2). With the foundation of this German and is scheduled to begin operation next HPC alliance, the partners have given their spring. Currently, it is planned to run JUMP longstanding close cooperation a legal ba- simultaneously with JUROPA for at least sis for the future. JSC News No. 166 • July 2008 UNICORE Day at ISSGC’08 the research group on Nuclear and Hadron Physics at GSI has also been delayed due to a change of the directorate. JSC organized a UNICORE day at the International Sum- However, every effort is being made to overcome these diffi- mer School on Grid Computing (ISSGC’08) in Balatonfüred, culties as quickly as possible and to re-establish three well- Hungary, on 8 July 2008. The day started with an intro- recognised and active NIC research groups. ductory lecture on HPC systems and job management on (Contact: Dr. Manfred Kremer, ext. 3660) these computers. The background and principles of the UNI- CORE Grid technology were then demonstrated. This was followed by lectures, which focussed on the technical details JSC on ISC 2008 of job submission and workflows. In two practical sessions, From 17 to 20 June 2008, the 23rd International Super- 45 students from all over the world learned how to use the computing Conference (ISC) took place in Dresden. The command-line and graphical client of UNICORE to submit Jülich Supercomputing Centre was involved in the exhibi- jobs and workflows. The day closed with a presentation on tion as one of the members of the Gauss Centre for Super- e-Science with UNICORE, where several methods of using computing together with the Höchstleistungsrechenzentrum UNICORE in application use cases were outlined. The pro- Stuttgart (HRLS) and the Leibniz Rechenzentrum (LRZ) in gramme and accompanying material can be found at: Garching. On the new TOP500 list published during the ISC, http://www.iceage-eu.org/issgc08/programme.cfm#08 Jülich’s IBM Blue Gene/P system JUGENE is ranked the 6th (Contact: Dr. Achim Streit, ext. 6576) fastest supercomputer in the world. Outranked only by five US supercomputer systems – among them the new num- Supercomputer as an Educational Telescope ber 1 system "Roadrunner" from IBM breaking the 1 PFlop/s Each year, the BMBF initiative "Year of Science" highlights barrier – JUGENE is still the fastest supercomputer in Eu- one of the individual scientific disciplines. 2008 is the Year rope. This places Jülich and Germany in an important posi- of Mathematics. In this context, JSC is encouraging young tion among the leading HPC centres for computational sci- people to explore the fascination of mathematics and super- ence worldwide. computing. Senior pupils are invited to participate in an on- Another highlight from JSC’s viewpoint was that Bernd Mohr, line workgroup simulating stellar motion by parallel computa- Brian Wylie und Felix Wolf of JSC received one of two "Best tion. Each participant will download a small part of a compu- Paper" ISC 2008 awards for their contribution entitled "Per- tation describing the interaction and motion of 100,000 stars, formance Measurement and Analysis Tools for Extremely compute it individually, and upload his partial results. The Scalable Systems". projects will conclude with a symposium featuring a live run The PRACE project was also prominent at ISC, with a ple- of the same computation on the JUGENE supercomputer nary session on European HPC projects, including talks and a 3D visualization of the collected results. Participants from Achim Bachem and Thomas Lippert, a BoF about have a chance to win an internship at Forschungszentrum the HPC ecosystem, and a PRACE booth at the exhibition. Jülich along with other prizes. The closing date for applica- PRACE also awarded a young scientists’ prize for the best tions is 15 August 2008. Further information is available at: paper on petascaling to Stefan Turek, Dominik Göddeke et http://jdm.fz-juelich.de. (Contact: Inge Gutheil, ext. 3135) al. from Dortmund University of Technology. Once again, the conference saw an increase in the number News from NIC Scientific Council of participants – almost 1,400 this year. The next ISC will take place at Congress Center Hamburg from 23 to 26 June The NIC Scientific Council held its annual meeting in June. 2009. (Contact: Marc-André Hermanns, ext. 2054) Prof. Gernot Münster from the University of Münster and Prof. Dietrich Wolf from the University of Duisburg-Essen were re-elected as Chairman and Deputy Chairman of the Events Scientific Council, respectively. Furthermore, Prof. Kurt Parallel programming with MPI and OpenMP Binder from the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz was Date: 5 - 8 August 2008, 09:00 - 16:30 elected as a new member. An important topic was the NIC Venue: Ausbildungsraum 1, Jülich Supercomputing Centre research groups, which are currently undergoing a period of Registration: [email protected], ext. 2054 change: The research group Computational Biophysics and Introduction to programming and using the Biology at Forschungszentrum Jülich concluded its activities IBM supercomputers in July 2008; a successor group is currently being set up. Fi- Date: 11 - 12 August 2008, beginning on 11 August, 13:00 nal negotiations are in progress with the designated head of Venue: Hörsaal, Jülich Supercomputing Centre the research group Elementary Particle Physics, operated Registration: [email protected], ext. 6402 by DESY with staff in Zeuthen and Jülich. The setting up of Editor: Dr. Sabine Höfler-Thierfeldt, ext. 6765.