QPACE was a novel parallel computer which ranked No 1 on the Green500 List of energy efficient supercomputers in November 2009 and which has been developed to be primarily used for lattice QCD simulations. The compute power is provided by the IBM PowerXCell 8i processor, an enhanced version of the Cell processor that is used in the Playstation 3. The QPACE nodes are interconnected by a custom, application optimized 3-dimensional torus network implemented on an FPGA. To achieve the very high packaging density of 26 TFlops per rack a new water cooling concept has been developed and successfully realized.

Project partners

• DESY
• IBM
• Research Centre Jülich
• University of Ferrara
• University of Milano-Bicocca
• University of Regensburg
• University of Wuppertal