December 30, 1969
Technical details on JUPITER
Further information and tips for users can be found on JSC’s dedicated webpage.
Whether it be the digital transformation, climate protection, the energy transition, or the development of a sustainable circular economy, it takes a great deal of computing power to solve many of the big issues facing humanity. JUPITER will provide a huge boost for research in these areas – for the development and use of artificial intelligence, as well as for simulations and data analysis.
JUPITER – Paving the way to the exascale era
JUPITER, the first European exascale supercomputer, is set to be launched at Forschungszentrum Jülich. “Joint Undertaking Pioneer for Innovative and Transformative Exascale Research”, or JUPITER for short, is the first system in Europe with a computing power of more than one quintillion floating-point operations per second. JUPITER is set to achieve the performance of one exaflop/s with double the precision (64 bits) typically required for scientific simulations. When used as an AI trainer, JUPITER will be able to provide an AI computing power of about 40 ExaFLOP/s at 8 bit AI precision or even 80 ExaFLOP/s in 8 bit sparsity mode. This would make JUPITER one of the fastest computers for AI in the world. The system is provided by a supercomputer consortium of ParTec and Eviden and was procured by the EuroHPC JU in collaboration with the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC).
How JUPITER is used: Examples of applications
JUPITER in numbers
JUPITER will consist of two computing modules. The Booster module will have approximately 6000 compute nodes integrated in 125 racks and will feature around 24,000 NVIDIA GH200 superchips interconnected via a Quantum-2 InfiniBand network. The cluster module will have more than 1,300 nodes and is equipped with the new Rhea processor from SiPearl, developed and manufactured in Europe.
JUPITER is a dynamic modular supercomputer with two parts: a highly scalable booster module for particularly compute-intensive problems, which is massively supported by GPUs, and a cluster module that can be used very universally for all kinds of tasks, especially for complex, data-intensive tasks. Both modules can solve scientific problems separately or together, depending on what is required.
JUPITER is being installed in a high-performance modular data centre. It consists of around 50 container modules on an area of over 2,300 square meters. This concept offers several advantages: planning and assembly times are significantly shorter, and construction and operating costs are noticeably lower. The infrastructure can also be flexibly adapted for new generations of computers and offers optimized solutions for power supply, cooling, and recycling.
Milestones on the path to JUPITER
Giga, Tera, Peta, Exa – every ten to fifteen years, the computing power of supercomputers increases a thousandfold. Forschungszentrum Jülich has decades of expertise in the field of supercomputers.
When the CRAY X-MP 1 was installed in Jülich in 1984, it was considered the fastest computer in the world. It managed 0.32 GigaFLOP/s. In 1987, the first German high-performance computing centre was founded in Jülich. A series of groundbreaking supercomputers have been and are being operated at the Forschungszentrum ever since.
Today, the Jülich Supercomputing Centre, together with the Höchstleistungsrechenzentrum in Stuttgart and the Leibniz-Rechenzentrum in Garching, is one of the three most powerful computing centres in Germany.
Who can use JUPITER?
As with all supercomputers, researchers who want to use JUPITER must apply for the limited computing time to work on their projects. Projects from Jülich also undergo a strict selection process here. In 2024, around 100 projects, many of them involving Jülich, submitted applications as part of the JUPITER Research and Early Access Program (JUREAP). This enabled around 30 applications to be launched. Further calls for participation for computation time are pending. The Jülich Supercomputing Centre operates JUPITER as a member of the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing – an association of the three national supercomputing centres in Germany.
Funding Agencies
European Union
The acquisition and operation of the EuroHPC supercomputer is funded jointly by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, through the European Union’s Digital Europe programme, as well as by Germany.
EuroHPC JU
The European initiative European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) is funding JUPITER with € 250 million.
MKW NRW
The Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia (MKW NRW) finances another share of € 125 million.
Additional Links
Jupiter-NEWS
Last Modified: 04.04.2025