Jülich supercomputer Jupiter starts trial operation

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Since late summer 2024, Europe's largest container data center in Jülich has been growing piece by piece towards completion. Now the centerpiece is also fully equipped. The module with Jupiter booster is ready for operation. In 125 racks, high-performance processors await computing jobs from science and technology. First, however, test operation is on the agenda, followed by technical acceptance from around May, which alone should take several weeks.

The supercomputer supplied by the Franco-German consortium ParTec-Eviden will then have to show what it can do. After all, there is a lot of money at stake: Jupiter is funded half by the European supercomputing initiative EuroHPC JU and a quarter each by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) via the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS). The waiting list for computing jobs is already long, so regular operations are to begin in parallel as soon as possible. The scientists do not want to wait until the official opening.

Booster module for simulations and AI training

The Jupiter booster module is equipped with around 24,000 Nvidia GH200 Grace Hopper superchips, which are specially optimized for computationally intensive simulations and the training of AI models. The module with the processors is located in eight so-called IT rooms, each consisting of two containers. Each of these double containers offers space for up to 20 racks. These racks are now being raised step by step. One double container will initially remain free as a reserve.

The container village, which was built on a concrete slab directly behind the brick data center of Forschungszentrum Jülich, is slowly coming to life. According to Jülich, a data center in containers is cheaper and more flexible than the conventional version made of bricks and concrete.

Green exascaler?

The 6000 servers in the booster module have a clear task: to be as high up as possible in the TOP500 list of the world's fastest computers. Jupiter is calculated as a computer in the exclusive exascale class. These are computers that can perform more than a trillion floating point operations per second – that's a one with eighteen zeros.

The data center itself has ambitions to join the list of the greenest HPC installations, the Green500 list. The most energy-efficient supercomputers are listed here as role models. There are still free coolers on the roofs of the containers to cool down the water-cooled computer modules. This is good in energy terms, but not yet good enough for the Green500 list.

The energy should be reused for this purpose. This is possible because fairly warm water is used for cooling, which can be fed into the research center's network via a heat exchanger. This means that the energy would no longer be wasted, but used sensibly for heating. The pipes have already been laid.

Jarvis inference module planned

The storage facility for Jupiter, the Data Hall, occupies four additional containers, the energy supply with transformers and control technology 21 containers, plus a UPS with battery for emergency operation. In the event of a power failure, the data is backed up, but the computer itself is shut down. Ten containers are reserved for users and service personnel. The cluster module will then move into the IT rooms in 2027. The 15 racks of the cluster will find space in the existing IT rooms and add a vector computer to the offering for scientists.

The remaining free space in the IT Rooms will soon serve as a home for new computing technology. At the beginning of 2025, politicians agreed to provide Jupiter with a 55 million euro AI expansion. The plan is to build a module called Jarvis (Jupiter Advanced Research Vehicle for Inference Services), a cloud platform specifically for inference calculations that also integrates experimental European technologies. Jarvis complements Jupiter's other two modules, Booster and Cluster, by creating predictions from AI models and constantly expanding them.

One of Europe's AI factories

"We are delighted to have been awarded the Jupiter AI Factory contract. This decision gives Forschungszentrum Jülich a key role in the development of the European AI infrastructure, which will benefit science, business, start-ups, SMEs and industry for socially highly relevant applications," says Prof. Astrid Lambrecht, Chair of the Board of Directors of Forschungszentrum Jülich.

As cutting-edge research in Europe is not just about AI, the processors of the exaflop computer should never get bored. Jülich is already planning new containers with additional computing power for the period after 2027. There would be enough space on the concrete slab of the container village.

In general, data centers in containers seem to be slowly coming into fashion. At the Hannover Messe, for example, HPE presented an AI server rack together with the Danish heating and cooling technology provider Danfoss, in which cooling liquid is pumped directly into the servers. The waste heat is then transferred to a whirlpool as a heat consumer via a heat recovery module. In practice, data centers should be able to be installed flexibly in the immediate vicinity of consumers, such as district heating networks.

(mki)