On Tuesday 3 October, the European Commission announced the signing of the contract for the acquisition of JUPITER, the first exascale supercomputer, by the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking or EuroHPC JU (see EUROPE 13036/34) and a consortium comprising Eviden and ParTec.
JUPITER should become Europe’s first high-performance computing system capable of performing an exaflop, i.e. one billion billion calculations per second. This should enable high-precision modelling of complex systems and the development of artificial intelligence (AI) applications in science and industry.
The supercomputer will be made available to researchers, the public sector and industry.
The system will be based on a dynamic modular architecture developed by the Jülich Supercomputing Centre in collaboration with EU-funded DEEP projects.
JUPITER will be built by Eviden and operated by the Jülich Supercomputing Centre.
Installation on the Forschungszentrum Jülich campus in Germany is scheduled to begin in 2024, and an early access programme to JUPITER will enable users to prepare and test it.
The project is co-financed with a total planned budget of €273,000,000. The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking will finance 50% of the total cost of the new machine. The other 50% will be funded equally by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia. (Original version in French by Émilie Vanderhulst)