Together with its partners Atos and ParTec, Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH has recently forged plans to expand the supercomputer JUWELS - the "Jülich Wizard for European Leadership Science". By adding the new "booster module" containing several thousand graphics processors, JUWELS will reportedly soon wield extremely high computing power and be able to perform artificial intelligence tasks. The module is being developed as part of a joint Franco-German project, with NVIDIA and Mellanox on board as co-designers. The launch of the booster in 2020 is set to increase JUWELS' current computing power from 12 to over 70 petaflops, equating to 70 trillion computing operations per second or the combined power of more than 300,000 state-of-the-art PCs.

JUWELS follows the innovative principle of the modular supercomputing architecture developed in Jülich, making it possible to combine different modules tailored to a variety of requirements. Thanks to the uniform system software, these modules can be pooled and interconnected to form a single, ultra-flexible supercomputer. The first "cluster" module, launched in 2018, was designed for expansion with additional modules from the very outset. The forthcoming booster module equipped with graphics processors is set to be the largest of these modules by far, meaning it will soon be possible to simultaneously process masses of data and particularly CPU-intensive program parts with maximum efficiency - for large-scale simulations or machine learning, for example.

"The modular supercomputing architecture makes it possible to integrate the best available technologies flexibly and without any compromises," explains Prof. Thomas Lippert, Director of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC). "The outstanding modularity of this solution is our answer to the increasingly complex and heterogeneous requirements that application codes place on supercomputers. It enables us to implement exascale computing systems cost-effectively and will even make it possible to integrate exotic future technologies such as quantum computers."

Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH (52428 Jülich, Germany)
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