A new supercomputer is being built in Jülich. It is expected to be faster than any other systems. In the future, it will mainly be used for AI training.
What kind of supercomputer will this be? The supercomputer JUPITER (Joint Undertaking Pioneer for Innovative and Transformative Exascale Research) was commissioned by the European supercomputer consortium EuroHPC JU in October 2023.
A total of three supercomputers are planned. The first of the three planned computers will be built in Germany and is expected to be operational within a year. This was reported by our colleagues from PCGamer.
Who is behind it? The Jülich Supercomputing Center and the French computer company Eviden have now made an agreement for the construction of the supercomputer. This is about an exascale-class computer that is supposed to be capable of processing vast amounts of data at once.
Nvidia chips power large supercomputer
What hardware is in the system? JUPITER is expected to be powered by several Nvidia GH200 Grace Hopper superchips and is primarily intended for AI training. The computer is set to become the world’s most powerful AI system, achieving a performance of 90 exaFLOPs in training AI models. One exaflop represents 1 quintillion floating-point operations per second, which corresponds to an exaFLOPS performance in the HPC (High Performance Computing) field.
As a comparison: In the gaming sector, we typically measure performance in teraflops, and this number is significantly smaller. What teraflops are and what they actually bring can be read on MeinMMO.
The special thing about this supercomputer is its modular design. And this is supposed to have several advantages:
- Thanks to its modular construction, the system can be set up especially quickly. It is therefore expected to be operational within a year.
- Moreover, upgrades are much easier to manage, as new modules can simply be added.
- Additionally, costs are expected to decrease significantly due to the modular design.
A total of 45 modules are to be used: 20 IT units, 15 energy, and 10 logistics modules.
Where is the fastest supercomputer located? The Frontier, based at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has been at the top of the fastest supercomputers since June 2022. You can also find the “Frontier” in our cover image.
The system has an HPL benchmark score (High Performance Linpack) of 1.194 exaflops. Furthermore, “Frontier” is quite impressive:
A new computer weighs more than 2 cars and needs thousands of liters of water per minute
