At the Limits of Scalability?
Begin of 2008, JUGENE, a 64 thousand core IBM Blue Gene /P system, located at the Juelich Supercomputing Centre (JSC), Germany, became fully operational. In its early phase of operation, JUGENE primarily is used as a capability system for ab-initio simulations of materials science, computational biology, and lattice quantum chromodynamics. I will start reviewing scalability studies on the predecessor of JUGENE, the 16 thousand core IBM Blue Gene /L system JUBL, and I will compare our findings on JUBL with early, stunning results from JUGENE. Finally, I will discuss the increasing impact of Petacomputing on the future development of models and theories.
Thomas Lippert, Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany