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"Jupiter"/ Europe's fastest supercomputer

2025-09-05 17:20:00, Tech CNA

Europe's fastest supercomputer was officially inaugurated at the Jülich Research Center. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz hailed it as a technological and scientific breakthrough.

What is "Jupiter"?

"Jupiter" is Europe's first exascale supercomputer. This means it can perform at least one trillion (one followed by 18 zeros) arithmetic operations per second. There are already three such computers in the United States, all operated by the Department of Energy. In Europe, however, a computer like Jupiter is a novelty. According to Thomas Lippert, director of the Supercomputer Center at the German Research Center Jülich, Jupiter is twenty times more powerful than any other computer in Germany.

What is it for?

This massive computing power is particularly useful when collecting large amounts of data and solving major problems, whether in the areas of climate protection and energy transition, digital transformation or the development of a sustainable circular economy. In these areas, Jupiter will provide "a major boost for research, for the development and use of artificial intelligence, for simulations and for data analysis," explains Astrid Lambrecht, Chairwoman of the Board of Directors of the Jülich Research Center.

According to Lippert, Jupiter is Europe's first supercomputer to be internationally competitive in training AI models, a field in which the United States and, increasingly, China have led. Large language models (LLMs), such as those used in AI-generating chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT or Google's Gemini, are trained on massive amounts of text.

How much investment is required?

Jupiter is located in a structure covering an area of ??about 3,600 square meters, about half the size of a football field. The system is equipped with about 24,000 semiconductors from the American manufacturer Nvidia. The operators estimate that the cost of Jupiter and its operation over a six-year period will amount to 500 million euros. Half of the funding comes from the EU and a quarter from the federal government and the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.

According to the operators, Jupiter consumes about 11 megawatts on average, but in energy-intensive applications, such as training artificial intelligence language models, consumption can increase to 20 megawatts. However, the operators emphasize that Jupiter is not only currently ranked fourth on the list of the fastest supercomputers in the world, but is also the most efficient of the five most powerful supercomputers in the world./DW