German Chancellor Friedrich Merz inaugurated the new European supercomputer called JUPITER on 5 September.Credit: Ina Fassbender/AFP via Getty
As US and Chinese technology firms have competed in the race to be innovators in artificial intelligence (AI), Europe has fallen behind. But on 5 September, a European supercomputer called JUPITER officially reached the exascale threshold, a milestone in computing power. The device could boost European research.
JUPITER is the fourth-fastest computer in the world. Having surpassed one quintillion (1018) operations a second, it joins an exclusive league of exascale supercomputers. According to the European Union, it is also 100% powered by renewable energy, and ranks first in energy efficiency among supercomputers.
JUPITER’s computational speed serves its main purpose — to push the capabilities of research in areas such as AI, weather modelling, astrophysics and biomedical research. It gives researchers in Europe access to their own top-level supercomputer, rather than having to rely on machines in the United States and elsewhere.
The milestone is “absolutely” a big deal for Europe, says Kirk Cameron, a computer scientist at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) in Blacksburg, particularly with regards to AI and large language models (LLMs). “There’s this race going on in the world of who will be the innovators in AI,” he says. “It’s taken a little bit to get [Europe] into the race. So it’s really nice to see them making that progress.”
Nature examines what JUPITER can actually do, and what it will be used for.
What is JUPITER?
JUPITER, which stands for Joint Undertaking Pioneer for Innovative and Transformative Exascale Research, has been in development since 2018, with the explicit aim of giving Europe a foothold in the supercomputer race taking place around the world. Funded by the European Commission and EU member Germany, it is located at the Jülich science research centre in Germany.
JUPITER booted up and performed its first computations in July, says Thomas Lippert, the project lead on JUPITER at Jülich. Running on some 24,000 NVIDIA chips, JUPITER is capable of exceeding 1,000 petaflops — one exaflop, or one million trillion operations per second — at its peak performance. For comparison, a typical laptop operates at one teraflop, or one trillion calculations per second.
A day in the life of the world’s fastest supercomputer
Officially, JUPITER is the fourth-fastest supercomputer in the world, with a benchmark performance of about 800 petaflops, after the United States’ El Capitan (1.7 exaflops), Frontier (1.35 exaflops) and Aurora (1 exaflop).
Lippert says that having a supercomputer such as JUPITER will enable Europe to develop the talent necessary to build and operate such machines in the future. “Our economy and welfare depend on these technologies,” he says.
The EU says that JUPITER “runs entirely on renewable energy” to limit its impact on the environment. Lippert says that this is achieved by paying to use only renewable energy from Germany’s national grid.
When it is running at full load, JUPITER will use 17 megawatts of power, which is equivalent to powering about 11,000 homes. Cameron says such supercomputers can be extremely power-hungry and cause problems. “You’re competing with cities for power,” he says. “These things start to impact the infrastructure of communities around these areas.”
How will JUPITER help European research?
Researchers will be able to apply to use the supercomputer up to twice a year, and 30 projects have already been selected. These include research on AI applications, such as foundation models and video generation, climate models, particle physics, energy applications and biomedical research for drug development and disease control.