Europe shows its weapons to compete in the world of high supercomputing. If a few weeks ago the United States claimed the throne with Frontier, the first exascale supercomputer, capable of breaking the 1,000 PetaFLOPS barrier, now it is Germany that is running as a new benchmark. She will do it with Jupiter, the exascale european supercomputer primer.
The EuroHPC consortium has chosen el Julich Supercomputing Centre to build the first supercomputer of these characteristics. However, also The MareNostrum 5 tender has been approved these daysthe supercomputer that will be installed in the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and that will be among the top five most powerful supercomputers in the world.
With Jupiter, Europe wants to play in the same league as China and the US
In total, the project will have a cost of 500 million euros and is expected to be installed in 2023. Currently on the Jülich campus are the Juwels and Jureca supercomputers, although they are far from reaching the top of the most powerful supercomputers.
This very week, at the IT Center for Science in Kajaani, Finland, the LUMI has been inaugurated, straight into the top three most powerful supercomputer, with a capacity of 151.9 petaFLOPS. Although, it expects to reach a performance of 375 petaFLOPs during the next few weeks.
Jupiter hopes to smash these figures, with an exascale level, more powerful than “5 million modern computers”as described by the organization itself.
Like other supercomputers, Jupiter will be used to “calculate high-resolution climate models, develop new materials, simulate complex cellular processes and energy systems, advance basic research, or train the next generation of computationally intensive machine learning algorithms.”
Beyond the exaFLOP of power, Jupiter promises to become the most efficient supercomputer in the world, with an average consumption of only 15 watts. By comparison, the Frontier, which holds this title, draws about 21 watts.
In addition to the supercomputer in Germany, Europe has announced the development of four more centers, with different power levels between pre-exascale and petascale: Daedalus in Greece, Levente in Hungary, Caspir in Ireland and Ehpcpl in Poland.
Europe currently has five supercomputers in the top 500: Lumi in Finland, Vega in Slovenia, MeluXina in Luxembourg, Discoverer in Bulgaria and Karolina in the Czech Republic. Three others are close to starting: Leonardo in Italy, Deucalion in Portugal and MareNostrum 5in Spain.
The MareNostrum 5 in Barcelona is another of the European jewels in supercomputing
The MareNostrum 5 figures would currently place it in the top three of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, above Lumi, the current European benchmark. Although it is expected that when it begins operations, in early 2023, there will already be some other supercomputers working. Even so, Spain will have a supercomputer in the world elite, with a power of about 205 petaFLOPS and peaks of up to 314 petaFLOPS. Along with 200 petabytes of storage.
This week the tender for the project has been announced. It will be the company Bull SAS (Atos) that will help carry out the construction of the Barcelona supercomputer. In total, the project has a budget of 151.41 million euroswith the participation of the Ministry of Science and Innovation, the Government of Catalonia and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC).
MareNostrum 5 will be focused on strengthening medical research, mainly for the development of new drugs, virus propagation simulations, as well as AI applications and big data processing for branches as diverse as climate research or materials science.
