ParTec has joined several partners in supporting the Juropa (Julich Research on Petaflops Architectures) project undertaken by Forschungszentrum Julich (JSC).
ParTec will deliver its ParaStationV5 cluster management and operation software to manage more than 3,000 nodes of the Juropa II Supercomputer project. The project was set up by JSC to investigate emerging cluster technologies and achieve a new class of cost-efficient supercomputers for petascale computing. Explored technologies include hardware based on Intel Xeon processors and innovative extreme bandwidth low-latency network technologies. Besides ParTec, Bull, Intel, Mellanox and Sun are contributors to the project.
ParaStationV5 is a cluster operating system and provides unique features with common techniques fine tuned and optimised for high performance computing solutions to deliver an integrated, easy to use and reliable compute cluster environment. The optimised cluster software stack supports a wide range of server hardware platforms, various communication technologies and interconnects from Gigabit Ethernet to Infiniband components as well as many flavours of MPI implementations.
One of the goals is to overcome the high scalability limitation of today's general purpose clusters. This will lead to the next milestone to build clusters with petaflop performance. This project establishes the prototype of the next generation of general purpose cluster computer provided to the JSC as well as to a worldwide community of users and scientists.
The new system will increase the currently available computing power by a factor of 20. It opens the door to advanced research projects, offering researchers the possibility to work on today's major challenges in scientific research including, for example, energy management, novel materials and climatology.
'Science and industry increasingly rely and profit from simulations on computers of the highest performance class,' explained Professor Thomas Lippert, JSC director.
'Our partnership with Jülich, Bull, Mellanox, Sun and Intel, marks a significant step in the development of commodity supercomputer systems,' says Hugo Falter, COO of ParTec GmbH. 'We expect this alliance to deliver key components for general-purpose petascale cluster systems in Europe.'
