Climate change, pandemics, sustainable energy production: A new supercomputer should help to solve such important and pressing scientific questions. “Jupiter” works with a capacity of five million notebooks – and will soon be in a German city.
The first exascale supercomputer in Europe called “Jupiter” is to be stationed in Jülich, North Rhine-Westphalia. According to the Federal Ministry of Research and the research institution, a European network has selected the research center there as a location. There is only one computer of this type in the world.
The supercomputer is said to be the first computer in Europe to break the limit of one trillion arithmetic operations per second. In terms of computing power, it will be stronger than five million modern notebooks or PCs. The exascale computer is intended to help solve “significant and urgent scientific questions”. According to Forschungszentrum Jülich, this includes questions about climate change, how to deal with pandemics and sustainable energy production. The supercomputer enables the intensive use of artificial intelligence and the analysis of large amounts of data.
The total cost of the system is reported to be 500 million euros. Half of this is borne by the European supercomputing initiative EuroHPC JU, the other half by the federal research and science ministries of North Rhine-Westphalia. NRW Prime Minister Hendrik Wüst said that the computer coming to Jülich was “an award for science and overall excellence in our state”.
“I am very pleased that the first exascale supercomputer in Europe is coming to Germany,” said Federal Research Minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger. The funding from the ministry is “a major investment in Germany’s research infrastructure”. This is intended to expand technological sovereignty.