It will be the first European supercomputer to break the exascale barrier, just days after the announcement of the world's first machine to do so. Installation is scheduled for 2023 in Germany.
“Jupiter,” the acronym for “Joint Undertaking Pioneer for Innovative and Transformative Exascale Research,” was the name chosen for the first European supercomputer with the capacity to perform over a trillion operations per second. It would take about 5 million modern laptops or PCs to match the power of this machine.
It was announced during the inauguration of LUMI—the current fastest (pre-exascale) supercomputer in Europe and the third fastest worldwide—that Jupiter will be located in Germany. The construction of a dedicated facility on the Forschungszentrum Jülich campus will be the first step toward ensuring the completion of the installation, scheduled to begin in 2023.
The ambition is to be operational a year later. Like other supercomputers owned by the entity, Jupiter also envisions a dynamic and modular computing architecture. This means clustered modules that ensure an optimized response to complex simulations. This feature also translates to the possibility of integrating future technologies, such as quantum computing. For now, it's guaranteed that Artificial Intelligence will be a major focus.
One of the biggest challenges facing these machines is the energy consumption required to ensure their operation, and as such, numerous efforts have been mobilized to maximize efficiency. Jupiter will be no different. Its average power is expected to be around 15 megawatts, making it greener than the American Frontier, which also holds the top spot on the Green500 list with 19 megawatts.
On this path toward supercomputers aligned with the need to protect and restore the environment, Jupiter is expected to rank among the most sustainable. The cooling system will run on warm water, and "waste heat" will be reused.
This latest bid to make Europe a benchmark in terms of supercomputing requires an investment of 500 million euros, provided in equal parts by Euro HPC JU and the Ministry of Research and Education of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
