Europe Gets an Exascale Supercomputer
upstart writes:
Germany will host JUPITER, Europe's entry into the exascale realm:
Frontier, the world's first exascale supercomputer-or at least the first one that's been made public-is coming online soon for general scientific use at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Another such machine, Aurora, is seemingly on track to be completed any day at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. Now Europe's getting up to speed. Through a 500 million pan-European effort, an exascale supercomputer called JUPITER (Joint Undertaking Pioneer for Innovative and Transformative Exascale Research) will be installed sometime in 2023 at the Forschungszentrum Julich, in Germany.
[...] Exascale supercomputers can, by definition, surpass an exaflop-more than a quintillion floating-point operations per second. Doing so requires enormous machines. JUPITER will reside in a cavernous new building housing several shipping-container-size water-cooled enclosures. Each of these enclosures will hold a collection of closet-size racks, and each rack will support many individual processing nodes.
[...] JUPITER will rely on GPU-based accelerators alongside a universal cluster module, which will contain CPUs. The planned architecture also includes high-capacity disk and flash storage, along with dedicated backup units and tape systems for archival data storage.
[...] Even as supercomputers get faster and larger, they must work harder to be more energy efficient. That's especially important in Europe, which is enduring what may be a long, costly energy crisis.
JUPITER will draw 15 megawatts of power during operation. Plans call for it to run on clean energy. With wind turbines getting bigger and better, JUPITER's energy demands could perhaps be met with just a couple of mammoth turbines. And with cooling water circulating among the mighty computing boxes, the hot water that results could be used to heat homes and businesses nearby, as is being done with LUMI in Finland. It's one more way this computing powerhouse will be tailored to the EU's energy realities.
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