Exascale calculator for digital sovereignty

This significant technological milestone is the result of years of research and development work supported by Germany and Europe and driven forward in close cooperation with the research center's German, European and international partners. At the same time, it marks a key project for digital progress and international competitiveness.

As the fastest supercomputer in Europe and the fourth in the world, Jupiter heralds a new era of high-performance computing for the continent. In AI applications, Jupiter even achieves more than 40 ExaFLOP/s - making it one of the world's most powerful systems for artificial intelligence. The enormous computing power enables the training and application of the largest artificial intelligence models as well as the calculation of scientific simulations with unprecedented complexity and depth of detail. At its heart is the so-called Jupiter Booster, supplied by Eviden and equipped with around 24,000 GH200 Grace Hopper superchips from Nvidia.

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„The Jupiter supercomputer strengthens Germany's digital sovereignty. It puts Germany among the world leaders in high-performance computing.“ 

Dr. Ralf Wintergerst,
President,
Bitkom

Jupiter enables progress in climate, energy, medical and materials research, among other things. It will improve the accuracy of climate and weather simulations, for example for local extreme weather events such as heavy rainfall and heat waves. It will also drive forward the development of sustainable energy systems and accelerate research into the most complex systems such as proteins, cells and the brain - with the aim of developing new therapies more quickly.

Jupiter, the „Joint Undertaking Pioneer for Innovative and Transformative Exascale Research“, is funded half by the European supercomputing initiative EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) and a quarter each by the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR, formerly BMBF) and the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia (MKW NRW) via the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS). Jupiter is a supercomputer that has made the leap into the exascale class for the first time in Europe.

In terms of computing power, this supercomputer will be more powerful than five million modern notebooks or PCs. „Jupiter is the culmination of over ten years of development work by JSC with European and international partners. Jupiter will be the world's most modern and versatile exascale system for high-precision simulations and the training of the largest AI models,“ says Prof. Thomas Lippert, Director of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre.

Giga, Tera, Peta, Exa

The computing power of supercomputers increases a thousandfold roughly every ten to fifteen years. Forschungszentrum Jülich has decades of expertise in the field of supercomputers. When the CRAY X-MP was inaugurated in Jülich in 1984, it was considered the fastest computer in the world. It achieved 0.32 GigaFLOP/s. In 1987, the first German supercomputing center was founded in Jülich.

Since then, a number of groundbreaking supercomputers have been operated at Forschungszentrum Jülich. Today, the Jülich Supercomputing Centre, together with the Supercomputing Centre in Stuttgart and the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre in Garching, is one of the most powerful computing centers in Germany.