New John von Neumann for computing supports German researchers with 4 Cray and 3 QSW supercomputers

Munich, 28 December 98 The Research Center Juelich (RCJ) inaugurated NIC - the John von Neuman Institute for Computing - a cooperation with DESY (Deusches Elektronen-Synchroton) to support Germany's researchers in academia, research institutes and and industry with supercomputer power. In total there are two Cray T3Es, a T90, two J90s in Juelich and in Zeuthen at DESY three Italian Quadrics SIMD-systems, APE100 from Alenia Spazio. The new center will focus on supercomputer-oriented research, and will install competence groups and will organise education and training in HPC.

With the name John von Neumann (1903 - 1957) Institute for Computing, Juelich and DESY want to honour the father of computing. He worked interdisciplinary on different fields, mathematics, quantum physics, flow dynamics (meteorology), game theory for the economics and others. John von Neumann studied and gave lectures in Berlin, Goettingen and Hamburg. He had to leave Germany and became Professor at the just installed Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Most known he is with his "von-Neumann computer architecture", which is still now realised in the PCs.

NIC was founded on July 3, 1998 and is the successor of the 1987 HLRZ (HPC computing center), which provided scientists in physics and chemistry all over Germany. Thus is was the first German Supercomputer Center. In the beginning there have been two different supercomputers, one for HLRZ, the other for RCJ. The machines and the infrastructure as networks and software are operated by ZAM (Zentralinstitut for Applied Mathematics, headed by Prof. Friedel Hossfeld), a SGI/Cray T3E 512 processors (300 GFlop/s), T3E 256 processors (225 GFlop/s), vector machines T90 16 processors (30 GFlop/s), J90 16 processors (3.2 GFlop/s) and a J90 12 processor as a file server - installed in the timeframe 1997/1998. All the Crays are connected by a GigaRing with 1.6 GByte/s. The connection to the outside scientific world is done via DFN (German Research Network) B-WIN with 34 Mbps, the Gigabit Testbed West realises 2.4 Gbps between Juelich, Cologne and Bonn St. Augustin.

The counterpart on the DESY side is the Center for Parallel Computing in Zeuthen. There they installed in 1994 four Quadrics APE100 computer complexes, 8x8x8 Floating Point Units, 2 GB memory (25.6 GFlop/s), 8x8x4, 4 GB memory (12.8 GFlop/s), 2x2x2, 32 MB (0.4 GFlop/s) and 8x4x4, 0.5 GB memory (6.4 GFlop/s). These computers sum up to 768 processors and 45 GFlop/s. Its special SIMD architectur is optimal for lattice field theory and elementary particle physics.

The aims of NIC

- offering supercomputer capacity for whole Germany for projects in academia, research and industry in the filed of modelling and computer simulation as well as their methods

- supercomputer-oriented research and development on specific areas of physics and other natural sciences especially in elementary particle physics by forming competence groups for usage of supercomputing. Thwo such groups have been formed in elementary particle and multiple particle physics and visualisation, others are in preparation.

- education in different fields of supercomputing by symposia, workshops, summer schools, seminars and courses.

Professor Friedel Hossfeld, Head of ZAM, announced two such events, February 8 - 10, 1999 "Parallel Computing and Molecular Dynamics" and March 10 - 12, 1999 "Chaos in the Brain". He presented some of the actual HPC projects, the bloodflow in the brain, the functioning of brain activities. First data of the oxygen concentration in the blood are measured by magnetic resonance spectroscopy - magnetic field inhomogenities. The data is processed in realtime. From the results the measurement can then be optimised. Furtheron the data is visualised.

Thus NIC follows the proposals of the German Scientific Council of the research strategic tasks of a supercomputer center.

The Secretary of State of the German Research Ministry (BMBF), Dr. Uwe Thomas, announced that BMBF will have more money compared to the last years. The funding will be directed to projects. BMBF wants to restructure the research centers to research enterprises. Concerning HPC in Germany he mentioned that per inhabitant Germany is better than the USA, if one subtracts the classified and ASCI machines. He critisised that the cooperation of the German supercomputer centers has to be optimised. The project UNICORE, lead by ZAM, is the right direction. Here centers and vendors will produce a unified user interface for the centers.

More information:

Uwe Harms