Jülich / Luxembourg, December 14, 2022 – A hosting agreement has been signed between the European Joint Undertaking for High Performance Computing (EuroHPC JU) and the Jülich Supercomputing Center (JSC) where JUPITER, the first European exascale supercomputer will be located (see previous cover of JUPITER).
JUPITER was designed to support the development of high-accuracy models of complex systems and help solve key societal questions regarding, for example, climate change, pandemics and sustainable energy production, while enabling intensive use artificial intelligence and the analysis of large volumes of data.
JUPITER will be installed from 2023 on the Forschungszentrum Jülich campus in Jülich in Germany and will be operated by the JSC.
This new EuroHPC supercomputer will be co-financed with a maximum total budget of 500 million euros by the EuroHPC JU and Germany. Of this total, 250 million euros are provided by EuroHPC JU and an additional 250 million euros in equal parts by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the Ministry of Culture and Science of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia ( MKW NRW).
JUPITER will be available to serve a wide range of European users, wherever they are in Europe, in the scientific community, as well as in industry and the public sector. Access to the computing resources of the new machine will be managed jointly by the EuroHPC JU and Germany in proportion to their investments.
JUPITER will be based on a modular supercomputing architecture, which the Forschungszentrum Jülich has developed with European and international partners within the DEEP projects funded by the European Commission and EuroHPC JU. The modular architecture will allow optimized use of the various calculation modules during complex simulations. Such an architecture also means that the system will be well prepared to integrate future technologies such as quantum computing.
Like the others EuroHPC supercomputers, JUPITER will be designed with sustainability and eco-friendly compute-intensive in mind. It will be powered by green electricity while its water cooling system has been designed for JUPITER to achieve efficiency gains. Waste heat applications from JUPITER are being investigated by the Forschungszentrum Jülich.
The hosting agreement is a contractual document that defines the roles, rights and obligations of each of the parties. The procurement process for this new supercomputer will be managed by EuroHPC JU and will start soon.
In June 2022, the EuroHPC joint venture announced the selection of new sites to host new world-class supercomputers. These hosts were selected following two calls for expressions of interest launched in December 2021.
The EuroHPC JU is a legal and funding entity, created in 2018 and 2021 revised by means of Council Regulation (EU) 2021/1173, with the mission of:
- develop, deploy, extend and maintain in the EU a federated, secure and hyperconnected ecosystem of world-leading supercomputing, quantum computing, services and data infrastructures;
- support the development and adoption of an innovative and competitive demand-driven and user-driven supercomputing system based on a supply chain that will ensure components, technologies and knowledge that limit the risk of disruptions and the development of a wide range of applications optimized for these systems;
- extend the use of this supercomputing infrastructure to a large number of public and private users and support the development of key HPC skills for European science and industry.
To provide Europe with a world-class supercomputing infrastructure, the EuroHPC joint venture has already purchased eight supercomputers, located across Europe. Five supercomputers are now operational: BEDROOM in Finland, LEONARD in Italy, Vega in Slovenia, MeluXina in Luxembourg, Discoverer in Bulgaria and carolina in the Czech Republic. Two other supercomputers are also in progress: MareNostrum5 in Spain and Deucalion in Portugal.