JUGENE (''Jülich Blue Gene'') was a supercomputer built by IBM for

Forschungszentrum Jülich Forschungszentrum Jülich (FZJ here for short) is a national research institution that pursues interdisciplinary research in the fields of energy, information, and bioeconomy. It operates research infrastructures with a focus on supercomputers. C ...

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 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 updates always coinc ...

list. The computer was owned by the "Jülich Supercomputing Centre" (JSC) and the

Gauss Centre for Supercomputing The Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS) combines the three national supercomputing centres HLRS (High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart), JSC (Jülich Supercomputing Centre), and LRZ (Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, Garching near Munich) int ...

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

(R_peak). With an official Linpack 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 (german: Nordrhein-Westfalen, ; li, Noordrien-Wesfale ; nds, Noordrhien-Westfalen; ksh, Noodrhing-Wäßßfaale), commonly shortened to NRW (), is a state (''Land'') in Western Germany. With more than 18 million inhab ...

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

Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres The Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres (german: Helmholtz-Gemeinschaft Deutscher Forschungszentren) is the largest scientific organisation in Germany. It is a union of 18 scientific-technical and biological-medical research centers. ...

. 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 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 quantify the rate of energy transfer. The watt is named after James Wa ...

and is therefore an order of magnitude more effective than a common x86 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 Petascale computing refers to computing systems capable of calculating at least 1015 floating point operations per second (1 petaFLOPS). Petascale computing allowed faster processing of traditional supercomputer applications. The first system ...

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 unit ...

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 unit ...

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

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

, 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 cat species and the only living member of the genus ''Panthera'' native to the Americas. With a body length of up to and a weight of up to , it is the largest cat species in the Americas and the thi ...

. 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 (often abbreviated to 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 compu ...

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

JUQUEEN JUQUEEN was a Blue Gene/Q system supercomputer built by IBM. Financed by the Helmholtz Association and the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS) in equal parts from federal funds and state funds from North Rhine-Westphalia, it was put into opera ...

References

{{Reflist IBM supercomputers Parallel computing Petascale computers Supercomputing in Europe