Germany will be the host of the first publicly known European exascale supercomputer, along with four other EU sites getting smaller but still powerful systems, the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) announced this week.

It should be switched on next year in a specially designed building on the campus of the Forschungszentrum Jülich research center and operated by the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC), alongside the existing Juwels and Jureca supercomputers.

Frontier- The strongest computer is also an exascale computer _Presentation image

A machine in the exascale class is a significant accomplishment even by supercomputer standards, representing computing power greater than five million modern laptops or PCs, and equal to the neural processing power of the human brain according to the Human Brain Project.

The mammoth project is projected to cost over €500 million for infrastructure, hardware, and installation costs alone.

With Jupiter, the basic configuration will include a universal cluster module and GPU accelerators, plus a high capacity parallel storage module, high bandwidth flash storage, and a high capacity backup and archive setup.

Jupiter has also apparently been designed as a “green” supercomputer and will be powered by green energy, according to the Forschungszentrum Jülich. It is also expected that Jupiter’s cooling system will be connected to the new low-temperature network on the campus so that the waste heat generated can be reused.

Exact specifications for Jupiter have not been disclosed, but both the Frontier exascale system and LUMI have been built with HPE Cray EX hardware, using AMD Epyc CPUs and MI250X GPU accelerators, with nodes linked using the HPE Slingshot interconnect.

According to theregister