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Introduction

Computers have become an essential tool in our quotidian lives. Very simple daily mundane activities as buying a train ticket or sending someone a message require the use of conventional computers. Of course, they play a very important role in more difficult tasks, as bank transfers for instance...
On the other hand, computers have also made possible many advances in Science and nowadays are patently present in a very wide set of different scientific areas. Indeed, many institutions around the World spend a huge amount of money and human effort to build clusters of computers (see for example, www.top500.org/lists/ for a detailed ranked list of the most powerful supercomputers in the World).

For some specific problems, conventional computers are not enough. They would spend thousands of years to perform some particular calculations. So in the framework of supercomputation one finds the Special Purpose Computers, which are developed and designed to perform any concrete heavy calculation.
In our Institute we have two special purpose computers. The first one, called Janus, was developed and designed in the last first decade of this century, being fully operative in 2008. More recently, the Janus Collaboration designed a second Janus generation machine called JanusII, that is at Bifi from end July 2013. In order to have more details regarding both special purpose computers, please click on the following:

Janus Janus II

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The Janus Special Purpose Computer

The Janus supercomputer is a modular, massively parallel, and reconfigurable FPGA-based computing system for High Performance Scientific Computing.
It takes the name from the ancient Roman god of gates and doors, of beginnings and endings, of passages and time, usually represented by two faces, one looking to the past, another one to future.

After a gestation period of around two years, Janus was born in 2008 thanks to a very successful scientific collaboration between researchers from BIFI and the Universidad de Zaragoza, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Universidad de Extremadura, Università degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza" and Università di Ferrara.

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The Janus II Special Purpose Computer

The JanusII Special Purpose Computer is the new generation supercomputer located at BIFI. As its predecessor Janus, JanusII was designed as a multipurpose reprogramable supercomputer, also based on reconfigurable FPGA processors.
JanusII was born during the summer of 2013 as the second high challenging project of the Janus Collaboration. These researchers from Spain and Italy (BIFI,

Universidad de Zaragoza, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Universidad de Extremadura, Università degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza" and Università di Ferrara) went an step further in the development and design of the new supercomputer respect its predecessor.

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Nobel Prize in Physics 2021

Congratulations Giorgio!

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10/7/2021

Janus in phys.org

JanusII in phys.org !

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6/1/2017

Janus on the media

Prof. Juan Jesús Ruiz-Lorenzo's article on the "Muy Interesante" scientific dissemination journal

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3/3/2017

FDT data

See our recent work about FDT using JANUS II on JANUSII/Publications

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1/26/2017

Open Call

International contest searching for scientific proposals to be developed in the Janus supercomputer.

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11/20/2014

References

[1] R. Pearson, J. Richardson, D. Toussaint, A Special Purpose Machine for Monte Carlo Simulations, tech. report NSF-ITP-81-139, Inst. Theoretical Physics, Univ. California, Santa Barbara, 1981.

[2] J.H. Condon, A.T. Ogielski, Rev. Sci. Instruments 56 (1985) 1691–1696; A.T. Ogielski, Phys. Rev. B 32 (1985) 7384–7398.

[3] “The RTN Collaboration,” Proc. Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics 92 (CHEP), CERN, 1992.

[4] A. Cruz et al., “SUE: A Special Purpose Computer for Spin Glass Models,” Computer Physics Comm., vol. 133, nos. 2–3, 2001, pp. 165–176.

[5] Janus Collaboration, "Ianus: an Adpative FPGA Computer.", Computing in Science & Engineering, January/February 2006, Volume 8, N 1, p. 41.

[6] Janus Collaboration, "Simulating spin systems on IANUS, an FPGA-based computer.", Computer Physics Communications 178 (3), p.208-216, (2008).

[7] Janus Collaboration, "JANUS: an FPGA-based System for High Performance Scientific Computing", Computing in Science & Engineering 11-1, 48-58 (2009).

JANUS

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Introduction

The Janus Special Purpose Computer

The Janus II Special Purpose Computer