JUPITER, Europe's most powerful computer, will be in Germany

But just as importantly for EU standards, it will be “green” thanks to its power feed

It’s now official – Europe’s first exascale computer will be located in the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC), in Western Germany, after the European Commission decided to award the procurement contract to the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU).

To put it in simpler terms, this is huge news not only in the tech scene but also in many fields of research, innovation and development since the new supermachine’s operations will be available to startups using AI to train their models on it.

Possible practical applications will include things like simulations for developing functional materials, creating digital twins of the human heart or brain for medical purposes, and high-resolution simulations of climate that encompass the entire Earth system.

First on the continent to breach into the exascale class

The name JUPITER itself is an acronym for Joint Undertaking Pioneer for Innovative and Transformative Exascale Research. That term however brings into the general consciousness of the term “exascale” to describe the operational power of the machine.

Once again, turning to comparisons will be useful here. The yet-to-be-set-up device has been described as more powerful than 5 million modern laptops. But to put it into an even better perspective, it will execute over one billion billion calculations per second! That is if all people on Earth made a calculation every second, it would still take more than 4 years to do the work that JUPITER will do in a second.

That kind of incredible capacity, however, requires huge energy consumption – calculated in the range of 15 megawatts. To answer these concerns, at a time when energy is a tricky subject, the developers have stated that JUPITER will be powered entirely by green electricity.

At the same time, the supercomputer’s cooling technology opens up the possibility of intelligently using the waste heat that is produced to keep the research campus warm.

The installation of JUPITER is expected to be completed sometime next year. What’s more, another exascale computer will soon be in the works with a horizon of installation in 2025 at the Jules Verne consortium in France.