According to NVIDIA’s announcement today, the JUPITER supercomputer has become the fastest supercomputer in Europe.

JUPITER is based on NVIDIA’s Grace Hopper platform and delivers more than twice the speed compared to previously highest-performing systems in high-performance computing and AI workloads.

It will soon be able to perform one quintillion (1 exa) FP64 operations per second, making it Europe’s first exascale, meaning an extremely fast, supercomputer.

FP64 refers to '64-bit floating-point operations,' which is a performance metric indicating very precise calculations performed at high speed.

JUPITER is expected to rapidly simulate highly complex scientific problems in climate modeling, quantum research, biology, engineering, astrophysics, and will be utilized for AI model training and inference.

Its power efficiency is also excellent. Among the world’s top five supercomputers, it has the highest energy efficiency, delivering 60 gigaflops per watt.

Gigaflops means billions of floating-point operations per second, which simply indicates how many calculations can be done using minimal electricity.

JUPITER will connect 24,000 of NVIDIA’s powerful superchips with high-performance networking equipment to achieve about 90 exaflops (exascale AI computing performance).

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang stated, “AI will greatly accelerate scientific discovery and industrial innovation,” and expressed confidence that European researchers will expand knowledge and create breakthroughs using this supercomputer.

JUPITER is operated at Germany’s Jülich Supercomputing Centre and is owned by the European joint project EuroHPC.

An executive from EuroHPC said, “JUPITER is a very important leap for European science, technology, and autonomy,” and announced it will promote fundamental research in climate change, energy, medical innovation, and various fields.

Leaders of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre also mentioned that this project will strongly support European researchers in cutting-edge AI model training and simulation.

Quantum computing research is also expected to advance significantly, aided by NVIDIA’s CUDA-Q platform and Q-Quantum software development kit that assist in quantum algorithm development.

The JUPITER project completed its modular data center and exascale system in about nine months, demonstrating Europe’s technological leadership.

Initial benchmark tests conducted with the Linpack performance measurement program earned recognition on the TOP500 supercomputer list.

JUPITER is set to provide innovative support across various scientific and industrial sectors, including climate and weather modeling, quantum computing research, AI-based engineering simulation, and new drug development.

In simple terms, this supercomputer can rapidly handle extremely complex computations and data processing tasks ranging from climate change prediction to pharmaceutical development.

For reference, European scientists can apply to use JUPITER, so many research institutions are expected to actively utilize it.

Overall, the JUPITER announcement marks an important event that raises both scientific progress through AI and Europe’s technological pride to the next level.