Jupiter Takes Europe's HPC Crown in 793Pf Top500 Run

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Germany's long-awaited Jupiter supercomputer launched into the number four spot on the Top500 list of publicly ranked systems, dethroning Italy's HPC6 as Europe's biggest, baddest iron.

Developed as part of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking and built-in collaboration with Nvidia and French supercomputer builder Eviden (formerly Atos), the system is designed to support research across a number of fields, including biophysics, cellular neuroscience, nuclear and elementary particle physics, astrophysics, and climate science.

Boffins [scientists] are also exploring the potential application of machine learning algorithms like those used in diffusion models to generate images to advance areas like medical imaging and autonomous vehicles.

In its first appearance on the biannual ranking, the Julich Supercomputing Center's (JSC) flagship system managed 793 petaFLOPS of double precision (FP64) grunt in the time-honored High-Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark.

However, the run is just a teaser for what's to come. Much like the US Department of Energy's Aurora supercomputer in its first appearance on the Top500 in late 2023, Jupiter's is also a partial run. The system is widely expected to be the European continent's first true exascale supercomputer.

Built by Eviden for the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking and deployed at the Julich Supercomputing Center in Germany, Jupiter is expected to be Europe's first exascale-capable supercomputer.

While Jupiter ranks as Europe's new supercomputing beast, it still falls far short of its American counterparts. The US DoE's El Capitan, Frontier, and Aurora systems remain uncontested as the only three exascale-capable supercomputers on the Top500 at 1.74, 1.35, and 1.01 exaFLOPS, respectively.

That's likely to change in the not-so-distant future once Julich can bring the full force of the Jupiter system to bear on the semiannual benchmark. The machine will only need to pack on another 207 petaFLOPS to its next HPL run to herald Europe's entrance into the exascale era, and just 220 more petaFLOPS to fly above Aurora. That's assuming, of course, the boffins at Argonne don't find a way to eke out a bit more compute from the Intel-based monster.

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