Three exascale supercomputers planned for Germany

On June 17, 2022By Garmin Philip

Julich, Stuttgart and Munich

In 2023, Jupiter, the first German exascale supercomputer, is scheduled to go online. Further systems are already planned in Stuttgart and Munich.

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The JUWELS in Jülich is Germany’s fastest supercomputer – yet.

With the “Frontier”, the first official exascale supercomputer went online in the USA in May. China is said to already have systems with such high computing power. But even in Europe there are already plans for computers that have a performance of at least one exaflop and will thus be included in the ranks of exascale devices.

Flops refer to the number of floating point additions and multiplications that a computer can perform in one second. For an exaflop, that’s 10¹⁸ or 1 trillion calculations per second.

The first such powerful supercomputer is to be built in Germany in 2023. Called Jupiter (Joint Undertaking Pioneer for Innovative and Transformative Exascale Research), it is to be housed in a purpose-built building on the campus of the Research Center Jülich start. There is also the currently fastest supercomputer in Germany, Juwels.

On this, Bettina Stark-Watzinger, Federal Minister of Education and Research: “This is a major investment in Germany’s research infrastructure, with which we want to expand our technological sovereignty. The computer will help to solve complex scientific questions and enable the analysis of huge amounts of data. This helps us, for example, with climate protection, fighting pandemics and developing artificial ones Intelligence.”

The Jupiter, which consumes an average output of up to 15 megawatts, is to be operated with green electricity. Thanks to its hot water cooling, it should also achieve the highest efficiency values. The waste heat from the system is intended to benefit the campus’ low-temperature network.

However, Jupiter is by no means a loner. The construction of exascale systems has already been announced for Munich and Stuttgart. So support the federal and state governments the construction of an exascale computer at the Leibniz data center in Garching near Munich with 250 million euros. The trio is complete with the system at the High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart. As the Gauss Center for Supercomputing, the three supercomputers are to become the most powerful data center network in Europe.