Today the fastest supercomputer of Europe is inaugurated in Jülich, Germany. The ceremonial act will be attended by the German Secretary of Education and Research, Annette Schavan, and the Prime Minister of the German Federal State North Rhine-Westphalia, Jürgen Rüttgers.

Jugene which is an IBM computer is located in the GSC (Gauß Centre for Supercomputing) and now offers a calculating power of up to one Petaflop/s. In June 2009, when the Top 500 of the fastest Supercomputers of the world are updated, Jugene is supposed to rank among the five fastest systems. As Jugene was taken into service in November 2007 it took place two in this ranking.

About 72,000 processors of the new supercomputer are housed in 72 water cooled racks. The amount of RAM reaches about 144 terabyte. Jugene is used for highly intensive, so called high scalable projects from all over Europe. Together with the other supercomputers in Jülich it has access to about 6 perabyte of storage capacity.

Technical Data:

Name: Jugene (Jülicher Blue Gene)
Type: IBM Blue Gene / P
Calculating power: 1 petaflop/s
Processors: 73,728
Processor type: 32 Bit PowerPC 450 core 850 MHz
Cores: 294,912
Compute node: 4-way SMP processor
Main memory: 144 terabyte
Racks: 72
Power consumption: 2.2 megawatt

According to Prof. Dr. Achim Bachem, chairman of the Jülich Research Center and coordinator of the European Supercomuting Alliance Prace, Jugene represents the access to one of the key technologies of the 21st century to Europe.

In the gallery below you can find several pictures of Jugene and its construction.