News Release

Forschungszentrum Juelich joins the OpenPOWER Foundation

Business Announcement

Forschungszentrum Juelich

JUQUEEN

image: This image shows supercomputer JUQUEEN at Jülich Supercomputing Centre. view more 

Credit: Forschungszentrum Jülich

Jülich, 23 April 2014 – Forschungszentrum Jülich has joined the OpenPOWER Foundation, an open development community based on the POWER microprocessor architecture. Platinum members of the foundation like IBM, NVIDIA, Mellanox and Samsung Electronics are leading providers of key High-Performance Computing (HPC) technologies. By joining the OpenPOWER Foundation, Forschungszentrum Jülich intends to foster the development of future high-end solutions by providing architectural and application expertise to the foundation.

"We expect OpenPOWER to broaden the scope of available supercomputing solutions and products which is crucial for us as a leading provider of supercomputing resources," said Professor Thomas Lippert, director of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) that operates some of the largest supercomputers in Europe.

JSC undertakes cutting-edge research in HPC architectures, applications and related technologies and has a long history of operating supercomputers based on the POWER architecture. "Integrating POWER processor technologies and high-performance GPUs opens an exciting path towards power-efficient exascale computing," said Professor Dirk Pleiter, JSC's head of the Exascale Innovation Center and the NVIDIA Application Lab at Jülich. These exascale labs had earlier been established together with IBM and NVIDIA, respectively, facing numerous challenges in the development of future generations of high-performance computers providing performance at exascale level.

"The OpenPOWER Foundation will benefit greatly from the leadership Forschungszentrum Jülich brings through years of supercomputing research conducted on the Power architecture," said Bradley McCredie, OpenPOWER President. "Their deep experience in a wide range of fields including fundamental physics, life sciences, and energy will be invaluable as the community pushes the boundaries of Big Data, modeling, and simulation further than before."

Ian Buck, vice president of Accelerated Computing, at NVIDIA, said: "The Jülich team has extensive expertise applying both POWER CPUs and GPU accelerators to drive new advances in scientific research. They are poised to be one of the world's premier research institutions bringing GPU-accelerated science to the Power computing architecture."

Forschungszentrum Jülich joins IBM, Google, Mellanox, NVIDIA, Samsung Electronics, TYAN, Suzhou PowerCore Technology Company, Servergy, Altera, Fusion-IO, SK Hynix, Micron and Xilinx in the OpenPOWER Foundation.

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