The Jupiter supercomputer has been officially inaugurated in Germany. Although the system is not yet fully complete, it has already broken through the exaFlops barrier, putting Europe on the HPC map.
The Jupiter supercomputer was officially inaugurated on Friday. The HPC system is located at the Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany and has been in development since 2023. Jupiter is currently the most powerful system in Europe and competes in the top tier globally.
ExaFlops Barrier
For the inauguration, Jupiter flexed its muscles. The system processed 1 trillion calculations per second. This gives Jupiter a computing power of 1 exaFlops (floating point operations per second). Europe now has its first exascale system.
The computer is only the fourth worldwide to break the exaFlops barrier. The other three are all in the US: Aurora, Frontier, and El Capitan. Although the threshold itself is rather symbolic, it distinguishes the most powerful systems in the world from more traditional supercomputers.
“This is a historic milestone,” says Henna Virkkunen, Executive Vice-President of the European Commission for Technological Sovereignty, Security and Democracy. “With Jupiter, Europe reaches the highest level in high performance computing. From a European perspective, Jupiter is a pioneer. It shows that when we combine national vision with European cooperation, we can achieve global excellence.”
Nvidia Everywhere
Eviden built the core module Jupiter Booster. Jupiter consists of about 6,000 nodes, each containing four Nvidia GH200 Grace Hopper superchips, connected via the company’s Quantum-2 InfiniBand interconnect. “Jupiter combines HPC with AI in a single architecture. The platform, designed for the next generation of scientific computing, will accelerate breakthroughs in every domain,” says Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who also has reasons to be happy from a business perspective.
HPC systems use a lot of energy, but Jupiter is relatively efficient. In terms of performance per watt, it’s one of the most efficient systems on the planet. This is partly due to the use of water cooling.
Prof. Astrid Lambrecht, Chair of the Board of Directors of Forschungszentrum Jülich: “Jupiter is the world’s most energy-efficient supercomputer in its performance class. Achieving this required decades of experience, deep expertise, and a passionate drive for development here at Forschungszentrum Jülich. At a time when digitalization and AI are demanding more and more energy, we are showing the way to efficient computer use with Jupiter.”
European ambition
The construction of Jupiter is part of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking project, set up by the EU. The Union identified a gap in HPC capacity and launched a financial program to support the construction of new supercomputers. This is important, as Jupiter comes with a price tag of 500 million euros, including six years of operation. The LUMI supercomputer in Finland, to which Belgium has contributed, is also part of this project. Hunter, filled with AMD components and also built in Germany, fits into this category as well.
There are also some caveats. Originally, the plan was to equip Jupiter with European-developed SiPearl Rhea processors. Their development was delayed. As a result, only the Booster cluster with accelerators is ready today, and its main components consist exclusively of American technology.
The general cluster built around the SiPearl Rhea CPUs is still planned, but won’t be ready until 2026. The CPU part of Jupiter is set to include 1,300 nodes, each containing two Rhea1 chips.
Modular
Jupiter is designed for adaptation and expansion. The computer is housed in a modular data center that should provide space for this. Given the significant delay of the SiPearl Rhea1 project, this modularity is a fortunate feature.
In any case, today’s inauguration of Jupiter is an important step for the HPC capabilities of the European Union. Jupiter, Lumi, and the other supercomputers built under the impetus of EuroHPC give the EU more independence. This is important given the geopolitical situation, where the US is increasingly turning away from scientific consensus on issues such as climate science. This is precisely one of the domains where HPC systems are indispensable.