Nov 23 2009
The QPACE computer (QCD Parallel Computing on the Cell), which tops the Green 500 list, won the award for the most energy efficient and high-performance computer at a global level.
The award was announced at the 2009 Supercomputing Conference held at Portland, Oregon on 20 November 2009. The QPACE supercomputer has been developed with the intention to prevent energy loss, and QPACE is the result of the combined effort from various research centers and universities, including the German IBM Research and Development Center in Boblingen, DESY and Research Center Jülich, the University of Regensburg, the University of Ferrara, the University of Milan-Bicocco and the University of Wuppertal.
Xilinx, Zollner, Eurotech and Knurr contributed to the development of QPACE computers. Deployed in mid 2009 with four racks at the University of Wuppertal and Research Center at Jülich, QPACE computer is used at Collaborative Research Center, with support from the German Research Foundation. The QPACE computer is used specifically in the area of quantum chromodynamics research and in computing vital forces in elementary particle physics.
Companies such as Toshiba, Sony and IBM contributed to the development of the IBM PowerXCell 8i processor, which is the heart of QPACE computers. Connecting networks to a scalable computer by a network of programmable units is the vital work carried out by QPACE computers. High speed calculations are carried out by the chip of QPACE, which consists of nine processor cores. In comparison with the 100 trillion operations conducted every second, about 100 TeraFlops are performed by QPACE computers used in Wuppertal and Julich.
High-performance computers to be developed in future will incorporate the technological concepts used in the making of QPACE computers. This is considered to be a practical futuristic outcome with reference to the much advanced energy efficient cooling concept introduced by the IBM Research and Development Center at Boblingen. Thomas Lippert, from the University of Wuppertal remarked that the development of energy efficient computers like the QPACE will lead to further research activities in Jülich and they will be used in more areas, thus increasing its usage rate.
An approximate amount of three million euros will be sponsored by North Rhine Westphalia and Bavaria for OPQCE computers. The development cost will be shared between IBM and the companies and research centers that played a vital role in the development of QPACE super computers. The utility level of QPACE is increasingly expanded with the extra support offered by the QPACE project, which was an outcome of the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe.