Europe, Germany, Gets first Exascale Super Computer

Europe get a big computing push.   See here for more about the specs of Exascale computing.

EUROPE GETS AN EXASCALE SUPERCOMPUTER    

Germany will host JUPITER, Europe’s entry into the exascale realm     in Spectrum IEEE

The existing supercomputing resources at the Forschungszentrum Jülich, shown here, will soon be augmented by JUPITER, Europe’s first exascale supercomputer. SASCHA KREKLAU/FORSCHUNGSZENTRUM JÜLICH

FRONTIER, THE WORLD’S FIRST exascale supercomputer—or at least the first one that’s been made public—is coming online soon for general scientific use at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Another such machine, Aurora, is seemingly on track to be completed any day at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. Now Europe’s getting up to speed. Through a €500 million pan-European effort, an exascale supercomputer called JUPITER (Joint Undertaking Pioneer for Innovative and Transformative Exascale Research) will be installed sometime in 2023 at the Forschungszentrum Jülich, in Germany.

Thomas Lippert, director of the Jülich Supercomputing Center, likens the addition of JUPITER, and the expanding supercomputing infrastructure in Europe more broadly, to the construction of an astonishing new telescope. “We will resolve the world much better,” he says. The European Union–backed high-performance computing arm, EuroHPC JU, is underwriting half the cost of the new exascale machine. The rest comes from German federal and state sources.

Exascale supercomputers can, by definition, surpass an exaflop—more than a quintillion floating-point operations per second. Doing so requires enormous machines. JUPITER will reside in a cavernous new building housing several shipping-container-size water-cooled enclosures. Each of these enclosures will hold a collection of closet-size racks, and each rack will support many individual processing nodes.

How many nodes will there be? The numbers for JUPITER aren’t yet set, but you can get some idea from JUWELS (shorthand for Jülich Wizard for European Leadership Science), a recently upgraded system currently ranking 12th on the Top500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. JUPITER will sit close by but in a separate building from JUWELS, which boasts more than 3,500 computing nodes all told.   ... '