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.
 
Following the same successful Janus philosophy, JanusII is composed again by 16 boards. On each board, 16 latest generation FPGA processors (Xilinx Virtex-7 XC7VX485T FPGA) are located and linked obeying periodic boundary conditions. They are called SP's from "Simulation Processor", since they will be in charge of the simulations. All SP's on each board are controlled by a full fledged computer that we call CP (Control Processor), running the Linux operating system. These CP's configure all FPGA processors for the simulations, controlling and monitoring their status. The CP uses a commercially available Computer-on-Module system (COM), based on an Intel Core i7 processor; it connects via the PCIe interface to a so-called Input-Output-Processor (IOP) built inside yet another FPGA. The IOP actually manages all connections to all SP's, controlling the configuration procedure and their operation, and monitoring their status. 

   

 
 

The Janus II architecture includes also improved communications, permitting the interconnection between all boards, and it enlarges 100 times the memory available.

 

JanusII will start to crawl very soon. Its first movements will be devoted to the study and simulation of spin glasses. Thanks to the new topology and improved performance, JanusII will allow us to study larger system sizes, increasing the simulation time and the number of samples achieved so far even with Janus.

 

In order to see a complete list of the Janus Collaboration publications, please visit the Publication Section of Janus and JanusII.

 
 
 

JanusII was built thanks to FEDER funds:
Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (Gobierno de España) and Gobierno de Aragón,
supported in collaboration with the European Union.

 

 

Public available data from JANUS

 
  •  FDT data from our last work with JANUS II (click here)