Jupiter’s power is equivalent to the capabilities of 1m modern smartphones put together.
The first computer system in Europe to achieve exascale threshold – one that performs more than one quintillion operations per second – was inaugurated at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre in Germany on Friday (5 September).
Called Jupiter, the supercomputer represents a €500m joint investment by the European Union and Germany via the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC) and is Europe’s most powerful supercomputer and the fourth fastest worldwide. Its power, to compare, aggregates the computing capabilities of 1m modern smartphones.
Jupiter is powered by Nvidia’s Grace Hopper platform and supported by other industry partners such as Eviden, Atos and ParTec.
The system contains high-powered, energy efficient processors, including the first prototypes of processors made in the EU under the European Processor Initiative.
Jupiter runs entirely on renewable energy and features state-of-the-art cooling and energy reuse, making it the world’s most energy-efficient supercomputer model.
The system is available to the scientific community, industries and public administrations across Europe and will run hundreds of applications around climate change, weather forecasting, material science, bioengineering, and training large language models.
It will allow researchers to run weather models at kilometre-scale resolution, enabling much more precise forecasts of extreme weather events. Jupiter will be accessible to start-ups across Europe to train and deploy generative AI models.
Jupiter joins existing supercomputers in the EuroHPC network – namely, MareNostrum in Spain, Leonardo in Italy, Lumi in Finland, Discoverer in Bulgaria, MeluXina in Luxembourg, Vega in Slovenia, Karolina in Czechia and Deucalion in Portugal – together conducting billions of calculations per second.
The supercomputers are a part of Europe’s wider strategy to develop AI gigafactories. EuroHPC has already selected 13 proposals for its AI factories, including in Germany, Spain, Poland and France. The factories will provide access to the massive computing power that start-ups, industry and researchers need to develop their AI models, the EU said.
“This is a historic milestone. With Jupiter, Europe becomes the home of the most powerful computer in Europe, and the fourth most powerful in the world,” said Henna Virkkunen, the EU’s executive vice-president for tech sovereignty, security and democracy.
“Just as the planet Jupiter has a gravitational pull that shapes our solar system, the Jupiter supercomputer will pull Europe’s research community, its start-ups, its industry, and its talent together. It will attract investment, stimulate breakthrough, pushing Europe forward.”
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said: “Jupiter fuses high-performance computing and AI into a single architecture. A platform for next-generation scientific computing, it will accelerate breakthroughs across every domain – from modeling climate and renewable energy to advancing quantum research, designing new materials and building digital twins.”
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