JUPITER: New supercomputer module for European AI factory

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The EuroHPC JU (European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking) plans to put six new AI factories into operation next year; one of them at Forschungszentrum Jülich. The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the Ministries of Science in North Rhine-Westphalia and Hesse are investing 55 million euros in this project. The JAIF, the JUPITER AI Factory, a new AI community focusing on the provision of services and resources for industry, is to be created.

A new supercomputer module for the JUPITER exascaler called JARVIS (JUPITER Advanced Research Vehicle for Inference Services) is planned as part of the JAIF. JARVIS is intended to complement the two existing JUPITER modules Booster and Cluster and serve as a cloud platform specifically for inference applications.

Booster for training, JARVIS for inference

The Booster module with its approximately 24,000 Nvidia GPUs will continue to be used for AI training. JARVIS will then take over the subsequent inference, i.e., the application. This includes text generation, image analysis or complex calculations as well as further optimization of the models, i.e., refinement learning. JARVIS will also support new inference techniques, such as inference time scaling.

In addition to research institutions and the public sector, start-ups, SMEs and industry will have access to the JAIF. The focus is on the application areas of healthcare, energy, climate change, education, media, the public sector and finance. In addition to access to JUPITER resources, the JAIF service includes an AI ecosystem with support for AI use cases. Support includes user training and consulting as well as services for data curation, base models and application optimization.

Key project of the EU

The JUPITER AI Factory is supported by several German AI institutions: In addition to the coordinating Jülich Supercomputing Center (JSC), the AI Center at RWTH Aachen University, the Fraunhofer Institutes for Applied Information Technology (FIT) and for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems (IAIS) as well as the Hessian Center for Artificial Intelligence (hessian.AI) are involved. In addition, the JAIF works closely with the German AI service centers WestAI and hessian.AISC as well as the German AI Association.

The JUPITER AI Factory is considered a key project of the European Commission's “AI Innovation Package to support Artificial Intelligence Startups and SMEs”, as the completion of JUPITER in the course of the year will provide by far the largest HPC and AI computing resources in Europe. However, close cooperation is also planned with the other five European AI Factories recently adopted by the European Commission and the seven AI Factories already initiated in December 2024.

As part of the European Commission's latest decision, the French HPC authority GENCI, which is building Europe's second exascale computer, Alice Recoque, will also set up an AI Factory at its site. Four more are due to go into operation in Austria, Bulgaria, Poland and Slovenia in 2026. A total of around 485 million euros in national and European funding is available for all six AI Factories.

First AI Factories initiated

In December 2024, the EU initiated the first seven European AI Factories, including the AI Factory HammerHAI (Hybrid and Advanced Machine Learning Platform for Manufacturing, Engineering, And Research @ HLRS), coordinated and located at the High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS) in cooperation with the GWDG (Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung mbH Göttingen), the BADW-LRZ (Leibniz Supercomputing Center of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities), the KIT (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) and SICOS, a spin-off of the KIT and the University of Stuttgart.

New computing resources are also planned for HammerHAI at HLRS. The AI Factories “BSC AIF” at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, “IT4LIA” at CINECA in Bologna, “LUMI AIF” at CSC in Kajaani, Finland, “Meluxina-AI” at LuxProvide in Bissen, Luxembourg, “MIMER” at the University of Linköping, Sweden, and “Pharos” at GRNET in Athens were also approved.

(sun)