On the Path to JUPITER

On the Path to JUPITER

In June 2022, JSC was selected by EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (JU) as the hosting site for the first European exascale supercomputer. Over the past few weeks, two important milestones on the path to realizing the JUPITER supercomputer have been reached. On 28 November 2022, a hosting agreement between EuroHPC JU and Forschungszentrum Jülich was signed. It defines the roles, rights, and obligations of both parties over JUPITER’s entire life cycle. This paved the way for the next step, which was taken on 16 January: the procurement of JUPITER was launched by EuroHPC JU in close collaboration with JSC. The vendor is to be selected by September 2023 and the installation of the supercomputer on Jülich’s campus will be started in the first quarter of 2024.

JUPITER will be based on the dynamic, modular supercomputing architecture, which Forschungszentrum Jülich has developed together with European and international partners in the DEEP projects funded by the European Commission and EuroHPC JU. It will be the first system in Europe to surpass the threshold of 1 ExaFlop/s (a billion billion floating point calculations per second). This next-generation European supercomputer represents a significant technological milestone for Europe and will have a major impact on European scientific excellence. With such unprecedented capacity, JUPITER will support the development of high-precision models of complex systems and help to solve key challenges facing society, for example, climate change, pandemics, and sustainable energy production, while also enabling the intensive use of artificial intelligence and the analysis of large data volumes.

This new EuroHPC supercomputer will be co-funded with a maximum total budget of € 500 million by EuroHPC JU and German government bodies. Of this total, € 250 million is being provided by EuroHPC JU and a further € 250 million in equal parts 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). JUPITER will be available to serve a wide range of European users – irrespective of where they are located in Europe – in the scientific community, industry, and the public sector. Access to the computing resources of the new machine will be jointly managed by EuroHPC JU and the respective German bodies in line with their investments. The German share will be part of the national supercomputer infrastructure provided by the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing.

Contact: Dr. Thomas Eickermann

from JSC News No. 294, 7 February 2022

Last Modified: 28.02.2023