The European Union proudly announces that the Jupiter supercomputer is on its way to becoming the first exascale computer in and from Europe, courtesy of Nvidia.
During the ISC conference in Hamburg, EU representatives announced that Jupiter has achieved a speed of 793 petaflops. This currently makes the supercomputer the fourth fastest system in the world according to the official Top 500 list, which was updated this month. Jupiter is well on its way to becoming the first European exascale computer.
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The supercomputer is located at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre in Germany and is a joint project of the European Union with private sector partners. Among others, Eviden, which split off from Atos, plays an active role in the project. The European Union wants to make the Jupiter supercomputer available for scientific research.
Nvidia under the Hood
Jupiter also has strategic importance for Europe. The system is optimized for AI and is intended to make Europe an AI superpower. Under the hood are no less than 24,000 Nvidia GH200 chips, connected with Nvidia’s Infiniband network platform.
This also makes Jupiter an important prestige project for Nvidia. Jupiter is Nvidia’s highest entry in the Top 500 list of fastest supercomputers, which is dominated by AMD. During his European tour, Jensen Huang was happy to make a stop in Hamburg to celebrate Jupiter. Nvidia is actively expanding its presence on the European continent through collaborations with local partners such as Orange Business and Schneider Electric.
The Jupiter supercomputer excels not only in computing power but also in efficiency. With a capacity of 60 gigaflops per watt, it is the most energy-efficient system in the top five.
Top 500
To break into the top three, Jupiter will need to surpass the magical exascale boundary (> 1,000 petaflops). The top three are currently still in the United States, with El Capitan as the champion. AMD also secures second place with Frontier, while Intel regrettably only manages third place with Aurora.
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Europe is not a small player when it comes to supercomputers. Besides Jupiter, HPC6 (Italy, sixth place), Alps (Switzerland, eighth place), Lumi (Finland, ninth place), and Leonardo (Italy, tenth place) represent the European continent. Jupiter seems to be the only one currently capable of challenging American dominance.
Which supercomputer is the most powerful in the world also depends on which ranking you consider. In the Graph500, a ranking based on data-intensive workloads, the Japanese supercomputer Fugaku from Fujitsu has been crowned champion for the eleventh consecutive time, and El Capitan is nowhere to be seen. In the Top 500, Fugaku stands in seventh place.