Europe’s First Exascale Supercomputer in its Starting Blocks

After the tender for the “Joint Undertaking Pioneer for Innovative and Transformative Exascale Research” (JUPITER) was launched in January 2023, the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) and the award-winning ParTec-Eviden supercomputer consortium signed a contract for the exascale system to be installed at the JSC, a member of the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS). The system will join the small circle of exascale systems in 2024 and will provide unique computing capabilities for the European HPC and AI community.

JUPITER will implement the dynamic Modular Supercomputing Architecture. The system will consist of a highly scalable booster module, a tightly coupled general-purpose cluster module, and a high-speed storage module. The cluster module will be based on SiPearl’s new Rhea processor made in Europe, which is a CPU with exceptionally high memory bandwidth for most complex workloads. The booster module will feature NVIDIA’s accelerated computing platform which is designed for next-generation data centre technologies to deliver extreme-scale computing power. The components will be integrated by Eviden into their highly energy-efficient, direct-liquid-cooled BullSequana XH3000 platform, and the modules will be dynamically operated as a unified supercomputer using ParTec's ParaStation Modulo.

The overall project budget for JUPITER is € 500 million, half of which is being provided by the European Union, and the other half equally by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the Ministry of Culture and Science of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia (MKW-NRW).

To ensure that JUPITER’s capabilities can be used from day 1, the “JUPITER Research and Early Access Program” (JUREAP) will open a call for participation soon.

More information: jupiter.fz-juelich.de

Contact: Prof. Thomas Lippert, jupiter@fz-juelich.de

from JSC News No. 299, 27 October 2023