Berlin (TDI): Germany has officially launched Jupiter, now Europe’s most powerful and fastest supercomputer, to put the continent’s capabilities in artificial intelligence at par with China and the United States.
The system, housed at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre, debuts Friday, becoming fourth on the global TOP500 ranking and effortlessly topping the lists in Europe.
The three on top of the list are El Capitan, Frontier, and Aurora, based in the US. After Jupiter, the fifth super computer is also found in the US.
This super computer is capable of performing at least one quintillion calculations per second, equivalent to the power of approximately one million smartphones put together.
The compute occupies roughly 3,600 square meters of area, which is half the size of a football field. It is packed with around 24,000 Nvidia chips, and costed €500 million to come to form. The cost has been equally shared by the European Union and Germany.
Thomas Lippert, head of the Jülich centre, lauded Jupiter as “a leap forward in the performance of computing in Europe,” adding that it is nearly 20 times more powerful than any other German supercomputer.
Europe has been lagging behind in the development of AI models. A Stanford University report found that while US institutions produced 40 notable AI models in 2024, China produced 15, and Europe only three.
The launch of Jupiter will help narrow that gap by offering researchers the computational firepower needed to train and test larger AI models.
In addition to the ability to produce AI models, Jupiter also offers critical support for climate modeling, with the potential to produce long-term forecasts up to 30 years, and possibly even 100 years into the future.
This super computer consumes an estimated 11 megawatts which, put simply, can run a small industrial plant or thousands of homes. To consume minimal energy, it has advanced water-cooling and recovers waste heat to warm nearby buildings.
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