In Brief
Start of the European Exascale Project DEEP
In order for Europe's research landscape to be able to draw on the required high performance computing resources also in the future, the Research Centre Jülich, together with the companies Intel, ParTec and twelve more European partners from eight countries, aims at entering into the exaflop/s era by 2020. As of December 2011, the EU project DEEP (Dynamical ExaScale Entry Platform) is to create a new platform for super computers of the next generation. With one quintillion arithmetic operations per second, such an exaflop/s computer would be a thousand times faster than current super computers today. The scientists expect a first prototype with a performance of 100 petaflop/s already in 2014/2015: About one hundred times faster than today's petaflop/s computers, such as Germany's fastest computer JUGENE.
Jülich scientists have devised an innovative "Cluster Booster Architecture" for DEEP. An important element here will be processors that are especially designed for parallel computing and containing 50 and more processor cores on one chip. Respective 512 of such MIC processors are connected to form a booster accelerating the entire system. "The cooperation with Intel helps us to accelerate the development of exascale-capable cluster architectures and to build both hardware and software for systems featuring this class of performance, to programme and to operate them", explains Prof. Dr Thomas Lippert, Head of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre.
