JUPITER: One for all
Europe’s first exascale computer is set to be launched at Jülich, JUPITER. The versatile supercomputer will be one of the world’s most powerful AI machines and opens up new possibilities for simulating complex systems. Its applications range from the quantum cosmos to issues relating to the energy transition.
The first supercomputer in Europe was launched in 1965. The CDC 6600 at the CERN research centre was able to perform three million floating-point operations per second. Any current smartphone would exceed this performance by countless orders of magnitude. And now, 60 years later, the great-great-great-grandchild of CDC 6600, JUPITER, is being launched at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC). It will be the first computer in Europe to surpass the magical threshold of one quintillion (a “1” followed by 18 zeros) floating-point operations per second. That is roughly equivalent to the performance of around one million modern smartphones, or around a trillion CDC 6600s. This makes JUPITER an exascale-class supercomputer.
But JUPITER’s record speed is not an end in itself. The simulations performed on the powerful supercomputer will provide insights that cannot be gained through purely experimental or theoretical means. JUPITER is a technological all-rounder that can handle a wide range of different applications. These applications address some of the biggest challenges of the future from the smallest to the largest scale – from the behaviour of individual quanta to global climate models, and from molecular processes in neurons to large language models.
JUPITER’s flexible architecture enables a wide range of applications. The supercomputer’s Booster module works on the basis of graphics processing units (GPUs), which are particularly suitable for a variety of highly parallel applications, as presented here. The Cluster module, in contrast, is suitable for more variable tasks with complex execution patterns, such as some physics simulations of interactions between elementary particles in atomic nuclei. With this approach, JUPITER is well positioned to serve both classic high-performance computing (HPC) simulations and advanced artificial intelligence (AI) methods.
Text: Arndt Reuning/Images: Forschungszentrum Jülich, Sascha Kreklau, Bernd Nörig/SeitenPlan with von Shutterstock.com
