Europe has officially inaugurated JUPITER, its first exascale supercomputer, at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre in western Germany. With this launch, Europe joins the small group of regions operating systems capable of performing at least one quintillion calculations per second. JUPITER entered the TOP500 ranking of the world’s fastest computers at fourth place overall, while taking the top position in Europe. Beyond raw performance, the system also leads in energy efficiency among the top five global systems, delivering around 60 gigaflops per watt.
The supercomputer has a modular structure consisting of a GPU-dense Booster module and a CPU-focused Cluster module. This design allows different types of workloads to be run separately or in combination. In total, the system integrates around 24,000 NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper superchips, linked through a Quantum-2 InfiniBand network. The infrastructure is cooled with a warm-water system that recycles waste heat into the Jülich campus heating network, contributing to the overall energy efficiency.
JUPITER is funded by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, the German federal government, and the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. The system was built by a Franco-German consortium led by Eviden and ParTec, with contributions from other technology partners. The system is intended for a wide range of research areas, including climate and weather modeling, materials science, drug discovery, astrophysics, and the training of large AI models. Early access programs have already enabled scientists to test applications ranging from fluid dynamics simulations to biomedical research.
