Munich, 5th October 2023 

A German-French consortium comprising of ParTec, the German developer and manufacturer of modular supercomputer and quantum computer, and Eviden, an Atos Group business leading in advanced computing, today announce a contract with European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) to provide the very first Exascale supercomputer in Europe, to be operated by the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) in Germany. 

The contract includes procurement, delivery, installation, hardware, software and maintenance of the JUPITER Exascale Supercomputer. The cost of the system and its operation for an expected six years amounts to 500 million euros. JUPITER is scheduled to be installed on the campus of the Jülich Research Centre in 2024.

By using the dynamic Modular System Architecture (dMSA), the central European technology to build modular supercomputer and quantum computer, as well as MSA-enabling ParaStation ModuloSoftware Suite from ParTec, the system achieves an outstanding level of computing power while decreasing the energy consumption. It will enable new breakthroughs in critical domains while fostering innovation for the entire European scientific community. Using next generation GPUs and CPUs from NVIDIA and SiPearl, ParTec and Eviden will manufacture the first European system with at least 10¹⁸ computing operations per second, 1 exaFlop.

“We are honoured to be selected for JUPITER and leverage European hardware and software technologies to build one of the fastest supercomputers in the world,” says Bernhard Frohwitter, CEO of ParTec AG. “The dynamic Modular System Architecture (dMSA) approach developed under the lead of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre and ParTec with the participation of several European partners and patented by ParTec is a truly European technology approach. It underlines the sustainable capability of European companies to compete in the field of supercomputing with big players in the US and China as well as the ability to build new hidden IT champions like ParTec. We are committed to supporting the EuroHPC JU and JSC to exploit the power of next-generation supercomputing to advance science research, drive innovation and foster economic growth. This is a great milestone for Europe`s technological sovereignty.”

JUPITER will have three times the computing capability of Europe’s current most powerful supercomputer and will provide the equivalent power of 10 million modern desktop computers. The overall system will require the space of about 4 tennis courts and will use over 260 km of high-performance cabling, allowing it to move over 2,000 Terabits per second, the equivalent of 11,800 full copies of Wikipedia every second.

It will be composed of three modules, a highly scalable accelerated Booster Module based on next-generation NVIDIA GPUs, a general-purpose Cluster Module with high memory bandwidth processors and an I/O Flash Module based on Spectrum Scale to tightly integrate with existing storage environment. The Cluster Module will be based on SiPearl Rhea1, the first HPC-dedicated European processor on the market.  

The system is financed by the European supercomputing initiative EuroHPC JU founded in 2018 (250 million Euro) and in equal parts by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia (MKW NRW).