Julich HPC Centre Integrating Mellanox 40GB IB Adapters

Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. announced that its ConnectX 40Gb/s InfiniBand adapters, 40Gb/s InfiniBand switches and cables will provide the high-performance, low-latency interconnect foundation for the new compute clusters being built at Forschungszentrum Julich in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, one of the largest interdisciplinary research centers in Europe.

The new cluster is being built through an innovative alliance between Mellanox, Bull, Intel, Sun Microsystems, ParTec, and the Julich Supercomputing Centre; the first such collaboration in the world. The new best-of-breed system, one of Europe’s most powerful, will support advanced research in many areas such as health, information, environment, and energy. It consists of two closely coupled clusters, JuRoPA, with more than 200 Teraflop/s performance, and HPC-FF, with more than 100 Teraflop/s. The latter will be dedicated for the European fusion research community.

"Mellanox’s energy-efficient, end-to-end 40Gb/s InfiniBand technology delivers incredible efficiency and scalability that will fuel and enhance our research activities," said Thomas Lippert, director of the Julich Supercomputing Centre. "Thanks to the efforts of Mellanox and our partners, Julich will host and operate the leading European cluster system above 300 Teraflop/s performance."

"We are pleased that our high-performance, low-latency, 40Gb/s InfiniBand technology was chosen to be the foundation for the high-performance research activities at the Julich Research Centre," said Wayne Augsburger, vice president of business development at Mellanox Technologies. "Our InfiniBand connectivity products continue to be the choice of the world’s most powerful and energy-efficient supercomputers, and they will enable this new system at Julich to achieve its highest possible performance."

"As the prime contractor of the Bull JuRoPa supercomputer, we are delighted to have Mellanox as a trusted partner for best-of-breed innovative network technologies," said Fabio Gallo, vice president and director of HPC Solutions at Bull. "Mellanox’s 40Gb/s InfiniBand end-to-end connectivity solutions bring the critical levels of performance and scalability required in today’s most powerful supercomputers."

"ParTec’s ParaStationV5 cluster operating system combined with InfiniBand-based high-performance systems delivers an integrated, easy to use and reliable compute cluster environment," says Hugo Falter, COO of ParTec GmbH. "This cluster will provide the foundation for the next generation of general purpose cluster computers to the worldwide community of users and scientists."