Europe's fastest supercomputer unveiled in Germany

May 26, 2009

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(From L to R) Chairman of IBM Germany Martin Jetter, chairman of the Juelich research centre Achim Bachem, Germany's Education and Science Minister Annette Schavan, North Rhine-Westphalia State Premier Juergen Ruettgers and director of the Institute for Advanced Simulation Thomas Lippert in front of the "Jugene" supercomputer in Juelich, western Germany.

A new supercomputer with the power of 50,000 home PCs -- the fastest in Europe and the third worldwide -- was unveiled on Tuesday in Germany.

The "Jugene," capable of 1,000,000,000,000,000 (one quadrillion) calculations per second, ranks behind the "Roadrunner" and "Jaguar" computers in the United States, said Kosta Schinarakis from the Juelich research centre, where the computer is located.

Jugene will be used for a wide variety of operations, including research on fuel cells for electric cars, weather forecasting and the origins of the universe, the centre said.

The machine is no ordinary PC, requiring 295,000 processors located in 72 lockers each the size of a telephone box.

(c) 2009 AFP

• finitesolutions - May 27, 2009
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  Computing warfare has begun: My computer is faster than yours. When will this madness end? They can compute my bank account: for sure a result different than 0 is more interesting.
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• Dhanne - May 31, 2009
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  Has this article really ment for telling about Jugene or is this only for blatant bragging that US has better computers than elsewhere?
  I'm little disappointed in the unscientific tone of this article.
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• Birthmark - Aug 20, 2009
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  There was one computer that does a trillion calculations a second, that would take a human with a calculator a million years to do what that does in one second (science channel) and they still need it to be much fast, amazing! Our computers today are nothing of the ones 25 years from now which will be billions of times stronger.
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