Now Live: Europe’s First Exascale Supercomputer, JUPITER, Accelerates Climate Research, Neuroscience, Quantum Simulation
At JUPITER’s inauguration ceremony in Jülich, attended by Germany Chancellor Friedrich Merz, the Jülich Supercomputing Centre and NVIDIA unveiled ways the supercomputer is already spurring innovation across the world.
The Jülich Supercomputing Centre’s JUPITER — Europe’s first exascale supercomputer — is officially live.
Unveiled today at the supercomputer’s inauguration ceremony in Jülich, JUPITER is accelerating innovative applications that are out of this world.
Powered by the NVIDIA Grace Hopper platform, it’s enabling breakthrough research in climate, neuroscience, quantum simulation and more.
Based on Eviden’s BullSequana XH3000 liquid-cooled architecture, JUPITER can run 1 quintillion FP64 operations per second and is expected to offer up to 90 exaflops of AI performance, delivering more than double the speed for high-performance computing and AI workloads compared with the next-fastest system in Europe.
A look between the rows of JUPITER racks.
Image courtesy of Forschungszentrum Jülich / Sascha Kreklau.
“JUPITER marks the culmination of more than a decade of research and development,” said Thomas Lippert, director of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre. “As the world’s most advanced and versatile exascale system, it represents a unique innovation, opening up completely new possibilities for science and industry in Europe.”
“With JUPITER, Europe gains its most advanced AI supercomputer, built for large-scale simulation and AI, powered by NVIDIA Grace Hopper Superchips and Quantum-2 InfiniBand,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “JUPITER fuses high-performance computing and AI into a single architecture. A platform for next-generation scientific computing, it will accelerate breakthroughs across every domain — from modeling climate and renewable energy to advancing quantum research, designing new materials and building digital twins.”
JUPITER’s ribbon-cutting ceremony was attended by a slew of Europe’s AI and industry leaders, politicians, researchers and others.
JUPITER’s inauguration ceremony. Left to right: Thomas Lippert, director of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre; Kristel Michielsen, director of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre; Ekaterina Zaharieva, commissioner for startups, research and innovation at the European Commission; Hendrik Wüst, minister-president of North Rhine-Westphalia; Astrid Lambrecht, chair of the board of directors of Forschungszentrum Jülich; Germany Federal Chancellor Friedrich Merz; Federal Minister of Research, Technology and Space Dorothee Bär; Federal Minister for Digital and State Modernization Karsten Wildberger; Ina Brandes, minister of culture and science of North Rhine-Westphalia; Laurens (Kobus) Kuipers, member of the board of directors of Forschungszentrum Jülich.
Image courtesy of Forschungszentrum Jülich / Kurt Steinhausen.
Germany Chancellor Friedrich Merz highlighted how the supercomputer is driving national advancement and industrial innovation.
Below are some exceptional numbers behind JUPITER, which 18 Germany-based and 15 European teams are among the first to access.
Why It Matters
JUPITER, which stands for “Joint Undertaking Pioneer for Innovative and Transformative Exascale Research,” gives European startups, enterprises and researchers a massive leap in computing power so they can quickly, efficiently create breakthroughs in:
- Climate science, including weather prediction and simulation
- Generative AI and large language models (LLMs) for European languages
- Neuroscience, including for drug discovery and mapping the human brain
- Quantum simulation, to bring quantum computing closer to reality
- Along with many other disciplines
Aerial view of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre campus, including the modular data center, on the far left, which houses JUPITER.
Image courtesy of Forschungszentrum Jülich / Sascha Kreklau.
For example, Max Planck Institute for Meteorology is using JUPITER to simulate climate predictions with a spatial resolution of about 1 kilometer, depicting extreme weather events such as violent thunderstorms and heavy rainfall much more realistically than before.
The Jülich Supercomputing Centre and a German consortium of nine European partners from research, industry and the media are tapping JUPITER for TrustLLM, a project that’s training the next generation of LLMs for various European languages. Such LLMs can ease workflows across virtually every industry by generating humanlike responses and improving productivity.
View of the rear of JUPITER booster racks, with warm water cooling.
Image courtesy of Forschungszentrum Jülich / Sascha Kreklau.
Neuroscience researcher Thorsten Hater at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre plans to use JUPITER to simulate the behavior of individual neurons on the subcellular level with the Arbor simulator. Such simulations will be crucial for developing therapies to combat neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s.
In addition, JUPITER is poised to break the world record for a supercomputer’s ability to handle qubits, the basic units of information in quantum computing. A typical laptop’s memory can handle about 32 qubits. The current record on a supercomputer is 48 qubits. An exascale computer like JUPITER could surpass 50 qubits — a significant milestone for quantum simulation.
View into a JUPITER rack with compute blades.
Image courtesy of Forschungszentrum Jülich / Sascha Kreklau.
Empowering European Researchers
In Germany and beyond, JUPITER is powering Europe’s most challenging research initiatives, helping scale the continent’s AI leadership with optimal energy efficiency.
Rendering of cooling systems on the roof of the modular data center that houses JUPITER.
Video courtesy of Forschungszentrum Jülich / Sascha Kreklau.
Early flagship projects include:
- Molecular dynamics simulation: The Max Planck Institute of Biophysics will use JUPITER to simulate the nuclear pore complex — the largest protein assembly in cells — to achieve atom-level insights, advance nuclear transport models and combat retroviruses like HIV.
- Multilingual LLMs: With JUPITER, the University of Edinburgh will generate synthetic data to train LLMs that can reason over long documents in any language. More LLMs are being trained through the JUPITER Research and Early Access Program across Europe.
- Particle physics: The University of Wuppertal will use JUPITER to significantly increase the resolution of its microphysical computations, including to study the magnetic moment of an elementary particle, called muon, and potentially discover new particles and interactions.
- Foundation models for video: Using JUPITER, the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich will develop spatio-temporal compression and diffusion architectures that enable the creation of high-quality, accessible video models to advance applications from medical imaging to autonomous driving.
- Multimodal AI foundation models: The University of Lisbon will tap JUPITER to scale multimodal, multilingual, open language models — integrating concepts from machine learning, sparse modeling, information theory and cognitive science — so these LLMs can support all European languages and address the limitations of existing models.
Learn more about how NVIDIA technologies enable supercomputing breakthroughs.
Featured video courtesy of Forschungszentrum Jülich / Sascha Kreklau.
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