JUPITER, Europe’s first exascale supercomputer, was inaugurated on 5 September in Jülich, Germany by Chancellor Friedrich Merz & European Commissioner Ekaterina Zaharieva. The inauguration marks the beginning of a new era for European supercomputing.
Developed by the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) and owned by EuroHPC JU, JUPITER ranks fourth on the TOP500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers and stands as the most energy-efficient system of the top five of the listing.
It also stands as the first European supercomputer capable of performing one exaflop, which is equivalent to one billion times one billion calculations per second (1 ExaFLOP/s).
It would take every person on Earth performing one calculation per second over four years to match what JUPITER can accomplish in a single second. This next-generation supercomputer represents a major leap in European technology and its unprecedented computing capacity will have a substantial impact on scientific progress across Europe.
With the launch of JUPITER, Europe hopes to boost its competitiveness and technological sovereignty, while pushing the frontiers of scientific simulations.
The supercomputer will facilitate the development of advanced AI models for socially relevant applications, ranging from medicine and highly precise climate and weather forecasts, to the optimisation of sustainable energy
systems and multilingual European language models.
Professor Dr Thomas Lippert, Director of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre, commented: “After a decade of intensive innovation efforts, we have collaboratively developed a system that not only sets new standards in computational performance but will fundamentally change scientific research across numerous fields.
“The most complex AI models can now be trained and applied – something that was not possible without JUPITER.”
JUPITER will be used to accelerate innovation and scientific discovery across Europe with access open to all users via the EuroHPC access calls.
This access will follow the successful rollout of the JUPITER
Research and Early Access Program (JUREAP), which, in recent months, empowered more than 30 lighthouse projects, 15 of which were selected by EuroHPC JU, to explore and optimise their applications on the system.
Through early access to JUPITER’s cutting-edge infrastructure, European researchers were able to push the limits of performance, experiment with next-generation hardware and software technologies, and fine-tune their codes for peak efficiency.
The participating projects covered a wide range of domains from chemical sciences and computational physics to earth system modelling, engineering, and large-scale AI, ensuring that JUPITER will deliver transformative impact across European science and industry from day
one.
"Outstanding" energy efficiency
JUPITER is also setting new standards in terms of energy efficiency – with more than 60 billion floating point operations per watt, JUPITER is the most efficient computer of the five fastest systems in the world.
With its highly efficient warm water-cooling system, the supercomputer is designed to use the waste heat generated in operation to heat buildings and will be integrated into the Jülich campus heating network.
"With JUPITER, Europe is entering the exascale era, unlocking unprecedented computing power to drive scientific discovery, industrial innovation, and technological sovereignty,” Anders Jensen, EuroHPC JU Executive Director, stated.
“I look forward to see[ing] the first wave of exascale applications and the breakthroughs they will bring.”