Europe's Fastest Supercomputer Is Finally Getting Its Domestic Silicon Infusion
"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:
Talk about digital sovereignty! Europe's most powerful supercomputer, Jupiter, is finally getting the domestic silicon infusion it's been waiting for.
On Tuesday, French chip designer SiPearl began delivery of its long-anticipated Rhea1 CPUs to Bull for integration into the system.
Jupiter, which came online last year, became the European Union's first exascale supercomputer. It currently holds the designation of being the fifth most powerful system on the Top500 ranking of publicly known supercomputers.
But that feat wasn't achieved using European silicon. The Jupiter Booster, which set the EU record, was powered by 24,000 American-made GH200 superchips from GPU giant Nvidia. These high-end accelerators were the precursor to the Grace Blackwell superchips used in its AI rack systems and featured a single Grace CPU and H200 GPU.
However, the Booster section is only part of the larger Jupiter system. SiPearl's chips will power a second CPU-only partition.
Rhea1 has been under development for several years and marks a turning point for sovereign supercomputing.
Based on Arm's Neoverse V1 core designs, the chip is already showing its age. Even the Grace CPUs powering the booster section use Arm's newer V2 cores. Yet, the Rhea1 is still notable.
With 61 billion transistors, the 80-core chip was designed specifically for running HPC and scientific workloads not well suited to GPUs.
In many respects, the chip is reminiscent of the Fujitsu A64FX CPUs that propelled Japan's Fugaku supercomputer to the number one spot on the Top500 back in early 2020.
Each Rhea1 processor is equipped with four stacks of HBM2e totaling 64 GB and achieving 1.8 TB/s of bandwidth. Along with the HBM, each Rhea1 CPU has four DDR5 memory channels.
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