18 November 2024
The journey towards Europe's first exascale supercomputer, JUPITER, at Forschungszentrum Jülich is progressing at a robust pace. A major milestone has just been reached with the completion of JETI, the second module of this groundbreaking system. By doubling the performance of JUWELS Booster-currently the fastest supercomputer in Germany-JETI now ranks among the world's most powerful supercomputers, as confirmed today at the Supercomputing Conference SC in Atlanta, USA. The JUPITER Exascale Transition Instrument, JETI, is already one-twelfth of the power of the final JUPITER system, setting a new benchmark on the TOP500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers.
Built by the Franco-German team ParTec-Eviden, Europe's first exascale supercomputer, JUPITER, will enable breakthroughs in the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and take scientific simulations and discoveries to a new level. Procured by the European supercomputing initiative EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU), it will be operated by the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC), one of three national supercomputing centres within the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS).
Since the middle of this year, JUPITER has been gradually installed at Forschungszentrum Jülich. Currently, the modular high-performance computing facility, known as the Modular Data Centre (MDC), is being delivered to house the supercomputer. The hardware for JUPITER's booster module will occupy 125 racks, which are currently being pre-installed at Eviden's flagship factory in Angers, France, and will then be shipped to Jülich ready for operation.
The final JUPITER system will be equipped with approximately 24,000 NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips, specifically optimized for computationally intensive simulations and the training of AI models. This will enable JUPITER to achieve more than 70 ExaFLOP/s in lower-precision 8-bit calculations, making it one of the world's fastest systems for AI.
The current JETI pilot system contains 10 racks, which is exactly 8 percent of the size of the full system. In a trial run using the Linpack Benchmark for the TOP500 list, JETI achieved a performance of 83 petaflops, which is equivalent to 83 million billion operations per second (1,000 PetaFLOP is equal to 1 ExaFLOP). With this performance JETI ranks 18th on the current TOP500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers, doubling the performance of the current German flagship supercomputer JUWELS Booster, also operated by JSC.
At the same time, JETI is highly energy-efficient, securing a 6th position on the Green500 list of the most energy-efficient supercomputers. This result underscores the high standards set by JUPITER's development system, JEDI, which was launched at Forschungszentrum Jülich in the spring and made it straight to the top of the Green500 list.
JUPITER will become the first supercomputer in Europe capable of performing over more than one ExaFLOP per second, which equates equals to one quintillion - a "1" followed by 18 zeroes - calculations per second at 64-bit double precision. This is comparable to the processing power of one million modern smartphones. As one of the most powerful AI supercomputers in the world, JUPITER is a driver of progress for Germany and Europe that will contribute to securinge technological and digital sovereignty.
Funding
JUPITER is funded half by the European supercomputing initiative EuroHPC JU and a quarter each by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia (MKW NRW) via the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS).
