Europe's first exascale supercomputer Jupiter inaugurated

Europe's fastest supercomputer, stationed in Jülich, Germany, has now been officially inaugurated. The system, called Jupiter, heralds the exascale era in Europe – this refers to supercomputers that can perform at least one trillion computing operations per second (1 exaflops). The fact that the system is almost complete was reason enough for Federal Chancellor Friedrich Merz, NRW Minister President Hendrik Wüst, and numerous ministers to rush to the Jülich Supercomputing Center (JSC) to attend the inauguration.

After four months of trial operation, the Jupiter Booster module is now officially up and running. As soon as the system developed by the JSC in collaboration with the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking and procured by EuroHPC has overcome the usual teething troubles, it is expected to achieve around 1.4 exaflops with double-precision floating-point calculations (FP64) using almost 24,000 Nvidia GH200 boards. This is a good deal more than the Jupiter Booster has achieved in the previous test run for the so-called Top500 list. The permanently maintained 793 petaflops (just under 0.8 exaflops) was enough for fourth place. For AI applications, meanwhile, a significantly lower accuracy is sufficient, such as FP8 with 8-bit instead of 64-bit values. This should enable Jupiter to achieve over 70 exaflops, including for training European AI models.

The organizers behind the Top500 project want to determine the world's fastest supercomputers. As hyperscalers such as Amazon, Google, and Meta, as well as Chinese operators, do not submit their benchmarks, the list primarily reflects the supercomputers available for research and science. In the next November edition, Jupiter could move up one or two places with the additional computing power. However, the top dog, El Capitan, with a permanently achievable performance of a good 1.7 exaflops and peak values of a good 2.7 exaflops, remains unmatched.

The expenditure for Jupiter plus operating resources, data center, and electricity over the following years adds up to 500 million euros. The three frontrunners, El Capitan, Frontier, and Aurora, are located in the USA, which is also where the chip designs for Jupiter come from. Europe lacks the technological expertise to build supercomputers without the help of the USA. Although Jupiter has a European manufacturer, ParTec-Eviden, the ARM processors (Grace) and Hopper accelerators on the GH200 boards come from Nvidia.

Although the JSC wants to test the Rhea1 processors designed in Europe, these will not be available until 2026/2027. More than 2600 of these processors are to be installed in the upcoming Jupiter Cluster module. Each of the processors combines 80 ARM cores of the Neoverse V1 type with 64 GB of HBM2e stack memory. In addition, two CPUs each share 512 GB of DDR5 RAM. The whole thing is a test balloon and is no longer up to date due to numerous delays. With an expected 5 petaflops, the cluster module will only account for a fraction of the total computing power.

500 times higher data throughput than the German Internet

The JSC has compiled several details for the inauguration. Each rack contains 192 Nvidia GH200 superchips, which together weigh two tons. The total of 24,000 boards, each with a CPU and GPU, are connected by 300 kilometers of cable via a fast Infiniband network. The data throughput is said to be 500 times higher than that of the entire German Internet. All 125 racks together weigh 3400 tons. This means there is a lot of metal in the 17-meter-long and 3-meter-wide containers and little space for service technicians. Chancellor Merz also felt the cramped conditions when he was asked to pose in front of the racks. The storage directly on the computer has a capacity equivalent to 450 billion books.

What Jupiter is currently already capable of was left open. Prof. Dr. Dr. Thomas Lippert, Director of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC), did not want to comment on this at the press conference. The supercomputer not only serves research but is itself part of it. After all, no one in Europe had ever constructed such a complex computer before. Even its predecessor Juwels, one of the fastest computers in the world at the time, was simple by comparison. Since May, manufacturers and users have been struggling not only with hardware faults but also with failures. According to Prof. Lippert, however, everything is in the green zone. Failures of up to five percent were normal at the beginning, and the manufacturer would provide free replacements as per contract.

Supercomputer heats neighboring building

As the most energy-efficient exascaler in the world, it will heat the neighboring building and generate electricity. Currently, massive installations on the roof dispose of the waste heat into the environment. With 160 kW connected load per rack and a total of 125 racks, there is plenty of it. Unlike previous supercomputers, however, no additional power is required for cooling units. The computer accepts water temperatures of 36 degrees Celsius as input. At 43 degrees Celsius, the cooling water then leaves the computer in the direction of the heat exchanger.

Future extensions are planned to include a neuromorphic computer and a quantum computer. From next year, the EU wants to shake up the AI world with 13 AI factories and stand up to the US companies. All factories will be located in the immediate vicinity of supercomputers. Thanks to Jupiter, Jülich is in the running with the Jupiter AI Factory (JAIF), while Stuttgart has been selected as another German location.

(mma)