Europe’s first exascale supercomputer, JUPITER, will be installed at the German research center Forschungszentrum Jülich next year. The computer will cost around 500 million euros, half of which will be paid for by EuroHPC JU, a partnership of European countries for the development of supercomputers. The rest is financed by Germany itself.
JUPITER will mainly be used for climate change, pandemic management, sustainable energy production and artificial intelligence research.
Exascale means a speed of at least 1 exaflop: 1 trillion (Dutch trillion, 18 zeroes 1) ‘floating point operations’ per second. This places the computer first or second on the TOP500 list of the world’s fastest computers in the neck and neck, with American Frontier achieving top speeds of 1.68 exaflops.
A lot of power is needed, up to 15 megawatts (15,000,000 watts) to achieve this speed. That’s a lot
It is not yet known who will supply the processors for JUPITER. The current top model of EuroHPC, the LUMI (found in Finland), consists of a 75,264 AMD Epyc CPU with 4,704 AMD Instinct MI250X accelerators. The LUMI’s top speed is around 550 petaflops (0.55 exaflops), meanwhile, so the JUPITER will be quite the upgrade.
Jülich launches JUWELS, the current supercomputer that reaches ‘only’ 0.085 exaflops
Source: Forschungszentrum Jülich (in German)
Source: Hardware Info
