JUGENE (''Jülich Blue Gene'') was a

supercomputer A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instruc ...

built by

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

for Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany. It was based on the Blue Gene/P and succeeded the JUBL based on an earlier design. It was at the introduction the second fastest computer in the world, and the month before its decommissioning in July 2012 it was still at the 25th position in the

TOP500 The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computing, distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these ...

list. The computer was owned by the "Jülich Supercomputing Centre" (JSC) and the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing. With 65,536 PowerPC 450 cores, clocked at 850 MHz and housed in 16 cabinets the computer reaches a peak processing power of 222.8

TFLOPS Floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance in computing, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate measur ...

(R_peak). With an official

Linpack LINPACK is a software library for performing numerical linear algebra on digital computers. It was written in Fortran by Jack Dongarra, Jim Bunch, Cleve Moler, and Gilbert Stewart, and was intended for use on supercomputers in the 1970s and e ...

rating of 167.3 TFLOPS (R_max) JUGENE took second place overall and is the fastest civil/commercially used computer in the

list of November 2007. The computer was financed by Forschungszentrum Jülich, the State of

North Rhine-Westphalia North Rhine-Westphalia or North-Rhine/Westphalia, commonly shortened to NRW, is a States of Germany, state () in Old states of Germany, Western Germany. With more than 18 million inhabitants, it is the List of German states by population, most ...

, the Federal Ministry for Research and Education as well as the

Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres The Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres () is the largest scientific organisation in Germany. It is a union of 18 scientific-technical and biological-medical research centers. The official mission of the Association is "solving the g ...

. The head of the JSC, Thomas Lippert, said that ''"The unique thing about our JUGENE is its extremely low power consumption compared to other systems even at maximum computing power"''. A Blue Gene/P-System should reach about 0.35 GFLOPS/

Watt The watt (symbol: W) is the unit of Power (physics), power or radiant flux in the International System of Units (SI), equal to 1 joule per second or 1 kg⋅m2⋅s−3. It is used to quantification (science), quantify the rate of Work ...

and is therefore an order of magnitude more effective than a common

x86 x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel, based on the 8086 microprocessor and its 8-bit-external-bus variant, the 8088. Th ...

based supercomputer for a similar task. In February 2009 it was announced that JUGENE would be upgraded to reach petaflops performance in June 2009, making it the first petascale supercomputer in Europe. On May 26, 2009, the newly configured JUGENE was unveiled. It includes 294,912 processor cores, 144

terabyte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable un ...

memory, 6

petabyte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable un ...

storage in 72 racks. With a peak performance of about one

PetaFLOPS Floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance in computing, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate measu ...

, it was at the time the third fastest supercomputer in the world, ranking behind

IBM Roadrunner Roadrunner was a supercomputer built by IBM for the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, USA. The US$100-million Roadrunner was designed for a peak performance of 1.7 petaflops. It achieved 1.026 petaflops on May 25, 2008, to become t ...

and

Jaguar The jaguar (''Panthera onca'') is a large felidae, cat species and the only extant taxon, living member of the genus ''Panthera'' that is native to the Americas. With a body length of up to and a weight of up to , it is the biggest cat spe ...

. The new configuration also incorporates a new water cooling system that will reduce the cooling cost substantially. The two front nodes of JUGENE are operated with

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) is a Linux-based operating system developed by SUSE. It is available in two editions, suffixed with Server (SLES) for servers and mainframes, and Desktop (SLED) for workstations and desktop computers. Its major ve ...

10. JUGENE was decommissioned on 31 July 2012 and replaced by the Blue Gene/Q system JUQUEEN.

References

{{Reflist IBM supercomputers Parallel computing Petascale computers Supercomputing in Europe Jülich Research Centre