17th September 2024 Europe's first exascale supercomputer begins installation The Jülich Supercomputing Centre in Germany has announced the start of installation for JUPITER, Europe's first supercomputer to reach an exaFLOP of performance.
In recent years, the global race towards exascale computing has finally gathered momentum. The United States took a major step in 2022 with Frontier, the first officially confirmed exascale supercomputer, reaching a speed of 1.1 exaFLOPS. China, while less transparent, is believed to have achieved this milestone around the same time, with systems such as Sunway Oceanlite and Tianhe-3. Now, in 2024, Europe is poised to join the exascale club with the installation of JUPITER at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre in Germany. As the continent's first exascale system, JUPITER is set to accelerate scientific research and innovation across numerous fields, from climate modelling to artificial intelligence, all while promoting energy efficiency. An exaFLOP is defined as one quintillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000) floating-point operations per second. To put that in perspective, exascale computing is 1,000 times faster than petascale computing, which achieved one quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) FLOPS. The first petascale machine, IBM's Roadrunner, achieved this milestone in 2008. Since then, advances in supercomputing have enabled ever more powerful systems to tackle increasingly complex problems, ranging from astronomical simulations to new materials, drug discoveries, weather models, and much more. The first modular containers of the data centre housing JUPITER have now been installed in Jülich. Unlike traditional facilities of this type, JUPITER will be housed in a Modular Data Centre (MDC), designed for flexibility and expansion. This innovative approach allows for future upgrades – such as the potential integration of quantum or neuromorphic computing technologies, without the need for extensive construction work.
Once fully operational in early 2025, JUPITER's data centre will consist of 50 containers, covering an area half the size of a soccer pitch. The €500 million project is being funded through a partnership between the European supercomputing initiative EuroHPC JU, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), and the Ministry of Culture and Science of North Rhine-Westphalia (MKW NRW). In terms of computational power, JUPITER will take scientific simulations to a whole new level, enabling researchers to complete tasks in a fraction of the time previously required. For example, simulations that once took weeks or months could now be completed in mere days. JUPITER – which stands for "Joint Undertaking Pioneer for Innovative and Transformative Exascale Research" – will achieve these fantastic speeds by using nearly 24,000 NVIDIA GH200 "Grace Hopper" Superchips, housed in a state-of-the-art liquid-cooled system developed by French company Eviden. This architecture will deliver exceptional performance, particularly for artificial intelligence (AI). While traditional high-performance computing (HPC) applications will have access to an exaFLOP of computing power, the system is optimised for AI-specific tasks that are expected to reach a whopping 90 exaFLOPS, which is 45 times the power of Jülich's previous JUWELS Booster system. It will use more than 260 km of high-performance cabling, for transferring over 2,000 terabytes of data per second. Alongside these immense processing capabilities, JUPITER is designed for energy efficiency, consuming only 18.2 megawatts of power. This will place it among the greenest supercomputers ever developed. As described in our latest prediction, supercomputers are likely to see ongoing, exponential improvements in performance and efficiency over the coming years and decades. While exascale systems like JUPITER are a remarkable leap forward, the next big milestone on the horizon is zettascale computing – machines able to perform one sextillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) operations per second. Experts predict that this could be achieved by the 2030s. As supercomputers become ever more powerful, efforts to improve energy efficiency will remain crucial in ensuring that these technological marvels contribute positively to both science and sustainability.
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