Ekaterina Zaharieva, European Commissioner for Startups, Research and Innovation, and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz inaugurated the new ‘JUPITER’ supercomputer (Joint Undertaking Pioneer for Innovative and Transformative Exascale Research) on Friday 5 September at the Jülich Forschungszentrum research centre in Germany.
This supercomputer has officially become Europe’s first exascale system, meaning that it is capable of performing more than one quintillion (10¹⁸) operations per second, a level of computing power comparable to that of a million smartphones. It has also become the world’s fourth fastest supercomputer.
‘JUPITER’ runs entirely on renewable energy and features a state-of-the-art cooling and energy reuse system. This makes it the most energy-efficient supercomputer module in the world, as confirmed by its first place in the Green500 ranking. It represents a joint investment of €500 million by the EU and Germany, channelled through the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking.
Researchers will now be able to run climate and weather models with kilometre-scale resolution, enabling much more accurate forecasts of extreme events such as heat waves, violent storms and floods.
Further information: https://aeur.eu/f/iai (Original version in French by Anne Damiani)