Giga, tera, peta – almost every ten years, the performance of the world’s fastest computers increases a thousandfold. At Forschungszentrum Jülich, the first exascale computer in Europe, JUPITER, will be launched in 2024. Supercomputers of this class can perform at least one quintillion (10 to the power of 18) floating point operations per second.
The system will be acquired by the European supercomputing initiative EuroHPC JU. The exascale computer should help to solve important and urgent scientific questions regarding, for example, climate change, how to combat pandemics, and sustainable energy production, while also enabling the intensive use of artificial intelligence and the analysis of large data volumes.
For many years, experts at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) have been working on high-performance computing technologies that will make the leap into the exascale era possible. This goal requires entirely new paradigms on several different levels: many millions of processor cores must be synchronized, the reliability of the components must be guaranteed, and new storage technologies are required. Moreover, reducing energy consumption is crucial in this context.
